CBO Confirms GOP Budget Bill Triggers Medicare Cuts

[cliffside]

5. Made me look :) More here - PAYGO's History and Impact on Fiscal Discipline

short article, it can be broken.

Rep Boyle will be testifying tonight at 1 am, should be interesting.

https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/policybasics-paygo.pdf

The “Pay-As-You-Go” Budget Rule

"The pay-as-you-go rule, also known as PAYGO, is designed to encourage Congress to offset the cost of any legislation that increases spending on entitlement programs or reduces revenues so it doesn’t expand the deficit. Under PAYGO, Congress must pay for such legislation by reducing other entitlement spending or increasing other revenues.

Congress and the President first established a PAYGO law in 1990 as part of a bipartisan budget summit agreement to reduce the large deficits the nation faced. It aimed to prevent future Congresses from reversing the tax increases and entitlement cuts both parties accepted as part of that agreement. PAYGO played a key role in helping reduce and then eliminate the deficit.

In the late 1990s, however, Congress and the President began waiving PAYGO in response to the booming economy and several years of budget surpluses. In 2001 they waived PAYGO enforcement and approved very large tax cuts without offsets — a sharp departure from PAYGO discipline. This set the stage for other PAYGO exceptions. In 2002 Congress allowed PAYGO to expire, facilitating the passage of deficit-increasing tax and entitlement legislation over the next several years, including the 2003 tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug bill.

Partly because of the return of large deficits, Congress used its internal rules to reinstate the PAYGO principle in 2007. It decided to prohibit the consideration of legislation that would break the PAYGO principle. In 2010, Congress and the President also reestablished PAYGO as a law, very much like the 1990 law..."