The Tea Party Debt Plan Also Ends Some Stuff That Doesn’t Cost Money

I’ll have some more about the Tea Party Debt Commission plan – a great gimmick that will not pass in any form – in a story later today. For now, I can run down the big cuts. It ends “foreign aid to countries that don’t support us” as an estimated $110 billion of savings (over ten years), the Department of Education for $950 billion, the Department of Energy for $210 billion, HUD for $530 billion, Title 10 family planning for $3.27 billion, the NEA for $1.5 billion, and it raises a tax by killing the welfare payment component of the Child Tax Credit – for $265 billion.
There’s a lot in there. But because this was crowdsourced, there’s also stuff that sounds budget-cut-ariffic, but isn’t. The endnotes point out that these cuts don’t actually save money.