Why Cutting Federal Spending to Pre-Pandemic Levels Is So Hard
'We have to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending,' says Republican US Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who doesn't like the budget bill that passed in the House because it doesn't reduce the $1.8 trillion federal deficit.
Given that the bill's failure to reduce the deficit is due in part to its extension and expansion of the special tax treatment for non-corporate businesses that Johnson insisted on in 2017, which will cost an estimated $820 billion over the next decade, the senator does not make for the most credible of deficit hawks. But his suggestion of a return to pre-pandemic spending is intriguing.
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