The budget is broke

An unusually thoughtful article about the Congressional budget process from some months back.

There's also an amusing discussion in McArdle's comment session in this week's article about the furious effort by Blue States to find a way around the tax bill's impact on their SALT deductions.  After the crowd discussed the inability of a state (unlike a city or county) to file for bankruptcy, and how you can default all you like but there's no bankruptcy court to issue an order discharging all your public and pension debt, a reader pointed out that debt arising out of an insurgency need not be honored.  That led to a discussion of the practical value of ginning up an insurgency for the purpose of obtaining debt relief.

2 comments:

Grim said...

Hmm. That is an interesting departure.

I remain amused that Democrats are treating the SALT deduction limitation as a kind of unprecedented political attack. SALT itself was the unprecedented political attack: it was an attempt to push blue-state costs off onto lower-tax, conservative states. Repealing it can't be unconstitutional if passing it was constitutional: they're the same move.

Texan99 said...

I'm looking forward to a lawsuit arguing that there's a constitutional right to a SALT deduction. As McArdle's expert said, "To state the argument is to refute it."