Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, the Biden administration has submitted its budget and the CBO, which I generally disregard because they are required by law to avoid dynamic scoring. And what dynamic scoring means is really simple. If the current tax rate is 50 percent and Congress were to increase the tax rate to 100 percent under the CBO requirements, they have to say that revenue will double.
Now, as Dr. Arthur Laffer has said, there are two tax rates that generate zero revenue. One is a zero tax rate, and the other is a 100 percent tax rate. And so if you don’t include dynamic scoring, you’re not going to get a good result. So it’s biased toward bigger government, but even then, the Biden budget calls for spending to increase to 25 percent of our economy.
To give you just a sense of things, from 1973 to 1922, that’s a 50-year period, the average was 21 percent. And so this is 3 percent more of the whole economy, which the whole economy at a $29 trillion economy, what you’re looking at is almost a trillion dollars a year of extra spending.
And that just won’t work. What I’m saying is, when you spend that much money at the federal level, all the wheels will come off. And we’re talking about here over the next 10 years. Now, just to try to give some perspective, in 1970, total Medicare spending, total Medicare spending was 7.5 billion, in 1970.
This figure has grown to almost 900 billion. It’s grown almost 100 times since it started 50 years ago. In 1966, Medicaid was just under $1 billion. That’s when the program started. Now it is over $650 billion. And the federal government is now trying to say that food should be part of Medicaid.
So the people who are on Medicaid can get free food under Medicaid. There’s no top on how much is spent once the benefit itself is defined. And so as we merrily go along talking about balloons and all kinds of issues that are important, but compared to Biden’s budget that he has given the Congress, anything else that we’re talking about right now for the next few years, this issue is the one that should be top of mind.
I see almost no reporting on it whatsoever by the media. They just have said he’s introduced his budget, and that’s about all they’ll tell you. And it does have in it, in his own budget, $2 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see. And that’s just unsustainable. Any reasonable person would say that’s unsustainable. But nobody in the media seems to be complaining.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by President Joe Biden. Background Photo “” by U.S. Capitol. CC BY-SA 2.0.
