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The President’s budget proposes to make permanent the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. At the same time, the President has argued that his goal of balancing the budget by 2012 will require substantial cuts to domestic programs. The budget proposes funding cuts amounting to $114 billion over the next five years in an array of domestic non-entitlement programs, including education programs, health research, environmental programs, and others.
The savings that would be achieved by these cuts in each of the next five years would be less than the cost of the tax cuts just for households with incomes above $1 million. In 2012, the President’s budget would cut domestic programs by $34 billion; the cost of tax cuts for households with incomes above $1 million would be $73 billion (see Figure 2). In essence, the budget would use the resources from these benefit cuts, which would affect millions of low- and middle-income families, to defray a small portion of the costs of the President’s tax cuts, which are providing very large tax benefits to the wealthiest families in the country.
As noted above, when the Tax Policy Center evaluated the distribution of the tax cuts in conjunction with possible approaches to paying for them, it found that most low- and middle-income families would likely lose, on net, from the combination of tax cuts and offsetting program cuts and tax increases. A similar outcome would almost certainly follow if the President’s tax cuts were extended and then ultimately paid for largely or entirely through domestic program cuts of the kind recommended in the President’s budget.