In the 4th Congressional District there are 187,000 Medicaid recipients. For now, the president has decided not to cut Medicaid. Unfortunately, he is looking for federal spending cuts to justify tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, namely billionaires.
Cutting Medicaid is still a real possibility as there is not a place to get the necessary cuts without looking at the Medicaid program.
That would be financially devastating to all the nursing homes, hospitals, doctors and medical offices in rural Central Washington. For many, access to health care would be emergency rooms, which are both expensive and limited to emergencies.
Politicians love to point out that the current national debt is not the result of a taxing problem but a spending problem. The last time the United States had a balanced budget was during the Clinton administration, when economic growth averaged 5.8% each year of his term.
The national debt when President Clinton left office was $5.7 trillion. Today it’s $36 trillion. The biggest contributors to debt were tax cuts by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Economic growth since President Clinton has been in the 2% to 3% range.
It is important to point out that Presidents Bush and Trump were both tempted by the tax-cutting siren call without seriously looking for spending cuts. In the previous Trump administration, the debt grew $9 trillion, and most of it was incurred pre-COVID. Spending continued unabated.
Like most fellow businessmen and successful individuals, paying taxes is not my favorite activity, but it is important to point out investments in manpower, fixed assets such as equipment and buildings, and research are done with pre-income tax dollars, not after income tax dollars. Income taxes do provide a tax avoidance incentive to invest in manpower, fixed assets and research. All are the basis of long-term economic growth.
There is room to not increase the tax burden on individuals and small businesses while putting a larger burden on multinational corporations, millionaires and billionaires as all are beneficiaries of an educated workforce and infrastructures such as roads, airports, dams, schools, universities, strong defense, a predictable legal system, etc.
If you choose not to know what you are doing, the easy way out is to cut, believing it won’t affect the average person. It is a sure thing it will. It is time to take a much more balanced approach to both taxing and cutting to get us out of the current national debt crisis.
If we don’t, inflation, high interest rates and high medical insurance rates will be an ever-growing problem for each of us. We need voters and politicians who think it is more important to save our nation than winning elections.
I hope Rep. Dan Newhouse will be one of those politicians who will have the courage to do just that. I think he will.
