Is the Gang of Six Debt Plan a Tax Increase?
The short answer is: probably, but it depends on how you measure it. Via Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy, former Congressional Budget Office director Donald Marron does a nice job of explaining several common ways of measuring whether or not the plan will result in a net tax increase. CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation are required to measure legislation against an unchanged current law—as if Congress simply went home and never passed new laws, overrode scheduled cuts, or extended old provisions, it's a tax cut. That's how the plan's supporters can get away with saying that it will lower taxes by $1.5 trillion. But as The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel explains in another look at the plan's tax-cut claims, current law is a dubious measure because "no one expects current law to prevail." And compared with current policy, a more realistic assessment of how Congress is likely to let current legislation play out, the results are quite different. According to Marron, by that standard, the Gang of Six plan, if executed as written, would represent about a $2 trillion tax increase.