Tax and Spend Back with a Vengence

While campaigning against Republican fiscal malfeasance in 2006, then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi promised to institute “pay-as-you-go budget discipline” to help lower the federal debt. Speaker Pelosi quickly betrayed that promise to the American people when the House failed to offset the $50.6 billion cost of protecting more than 20 million middle-class taxpayers from the Alternative Minimum Tax. Since then the House leadership has dropped all pretense of fiscal discipline, demonstrated most recently by tacking $54 billion in spending for veterans’ education benefits onto the latest Iraq/Afghanistan war supplemental.