President’s Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Proposal

Senate Budget, March 13, 2019
House Budget, March 12, 2019
Senate Finance, HHS Budget, March 14, 2019
Senate Finance, March 14, 2019
House Ways and Means, March 14, 2019
House Budget, HHS Budget, March 26, 2019

Finance and Ways and Means only: 

The federal budget process is broken. The solution must include incentives to keep the process moving.  Automatic appropriations would occur at Joint Budget Resolution marks, and if no resolution is passed, revised Budget Control Act spending caps would end this difficulty and spur action by both parties. Because BCA levels are too low, the marks in the Act could be increased by the legislation amending the process itself. These marks should be realistic rather than punitive. Part of any reform must include new caps be set through 2025, when parts of the TCJA expire as well. 

Omitted from HHS: As long as the current tax cuts are in force, the money not collected in taxes should be made up with bond sales, else all sorts of mischief occur in the area of asset accumulation and inflation. Such accumulations are not economic growth, they are the manufacture of speculative investment bubbles that always lead back to recessions and depressions. There is no such thing as a business cycle, only rich people who are undertaxed who invest in garbage and then sell it to the public, like any Ponzi scheme.  We remind the Committee that in the future we face a crisis in net interest on the debt, both from increased rates and growing principle. This growth will only feasible until either China or the European Union develop tradable debt instruments backed by income taxation, which is the secret to the ability of the United States to be the world’s bond issuer. At some point, however, we need incentives to pay down the debt.  The national debt is possible because of progressive income taxation. The liability for repayment, therefore, is a function of that tax. For every dollar you pay in taxes, you owe $13 in debt. People who pay nothing owe nothing. People who pay tens of thousands of dollars a year owe hundreds of thousands. The answer is not making the poor pay more or giving them less benefits, either only slows the economy.  

Rich people must pay more and do it faster. My child is becoming a social worker, although she was going to be an artist. Don’t look to her to pay off the debt. Your children and grandchildren and those of your donors are the ones on the hook unless their parents step up and pay more. How’s that for incentive to raise taxes? 

All Committees:

We have added a Carbon Value Added Tax to the first bullet of our comprehensive four-part approach to tax reform. An 25% Asset Value Added Tax will be added to the second bullet so that capital gains taxes can be repealed, making automatic filing possible based on submissions to the IRS from federal NBRT income and tax credit data provided by state revenue agencies (see bullet four). Aside from these changes, our proposals are identical to what we have stated previously, and can be found in Attachment One.

March 26th Addition to HHS Budget:

Our new proposed A-VAT removes the need for including heirs in the personal income surtax, other than on any direct transfer of cash or trust fund income over the standard deduction in a single year, which should still be taxed at normal income rates. The Death Tax on inherited assets will be repealed for everyone, but with the following proviso. Any asset transferred by inheritance or created by exercising stock options will be taxed at 100% of value when sold, rather than only the gain from inheritance or as a step up from when the deceased purchased them. As always, sales to a qualified broad-based ESOP are A-VAT free. We advocate tax simplification, not evasion. Tax evasion by the rich should not be considered a conservative value.