Politics & Government
With record federal budget deficit, Blumenthal wants to cut spending
U.S. Senator says Trump tax cut needs to be 'scrutinized'
By Scott Benjamin
BROOKFIELD -- On October 1, 1968, when Richard Blumenthal was a reporter and assistant to the publisher for the Washington Post, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson submitted his last federal budget.
On September 30, 1969, when Blumenthal was working in the Richard Nixon White House as a senior staff assistant in the Urban Affairs Office that was headed by his former Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the fiscal year ended with a $3.2 billion budget surplus.
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On September 30, 1998, when Blumenthal was running for his third term as Connecticut's state attorney general, his former Yale Law School classmate, Democratic President Bill Clinton, celebrated a $70 billion federal budget surplus -the first in 29 years.
At the end of fiscal year 2009, a little more than three months before Blumenthal would announce that he would run for the U.S. Senate, the federal government had incurred a record $1.4 trillion budget deficit as the country recovered from the Great Recession. Those deficits receded over the remainder of Democratic former President Barack Obama's tenure.
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In the Fall 2023, with Blumenthal now in his third term in the U.S. Senate, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the federal government has a record $1.7 trillion budget deficit. The Washington Post has report that $659 billion was spent during the last fiscal year just on paying interest on the debt.
In 25 years, we’ve gone from a $70 billion budget surplus to a $1.7 trillion deficit. What has to be done?
"We need to cut spending, but also enforce our tax laws more effectively,” Blumenthal remarked. "Cutting IRS resources is absolutely disgraceful with millionaires and billionaires getting away with tax evasion."
Democratic President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act includes $80 billion over a decade for the Internal Revenue Service to boost its enforcement of tax returns. The U.S. House Republicans have been trying to reduce that spending.
Former Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson, a Harvard 1967 classmate of Blumenthal's, has stated multiple times that the Kennedy tax cut that Johnson signed in 1964 was probably the worst domestic policy mistake since World War II. He claimed that, among other things, instead of seeking a balanced budget in the good years to offset the losses in the bad year, deficit spending became more acceptable. . Over the last 59 years there have been 54 budget deficits and only five surpluses.
In effect, that Kennedy supply-side formula was utilized for the 1981 Reagan tax cut, the 2001 W. Bush tax program and the 2017 Trump tax reduction.
Considering the record budget deficit, should the Trump tax cut be continued?
"The Trump tax cuts reward billionaires, not middle-class Americans. I think they need to be carefully scrutinized," Blumenthal of Greenwich exclaimed in an interview with Patch.com while standing in Brookfield Democratic headquarters three days before First Selectman-elect Steve Dunn and the local party ‘s ticket would sweep the municipal election.
On foreign policy, Biden has proposed a $105 billion assistance package for the Ukraine, Israel and other countries in crisis. In October, Blumenthal and nine U.S. Senate colleagues conducted a fact-finding mission in Israel.
Some congressional Republicans are balking at the aid for the Ukraine.
Blumenthal commented, “The combination of Ukraine and Israel aid is absolutely necessary. They are facing assaults from tyrants and terrorists. This really matters for our own security. My hope is that we will couple them along with border security and aid to Taiwan.”
Resources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/nyregion/18blumenthal.html
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/24992#:~:text=The%20Treasury%20recently%20reported%20that,the%20deficit%20incurred%20in%202008.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/20/interest-debt-payment-treasury/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/us/politics/biden-irs-overhaul-taxes.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/15/irs-funding-audits-endangered-republicans/
https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-suddenly-abandon-plan-irs-cuts-1842426
