House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) has said that raising taxes will be necessary to balance the federal budget. His comments will likely irritate President Trump and his team, given the pledge to make the Trump-era tax cuts a permanent fixture in a second Trump administration.
“It’s only fair to have both revenue and expenditures on the table,” Arrington told Semafor. “The last time there was a fix to Social Security that addressed the solvency for 75 years, it was Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, and it was bipartisan. It had revenue measures and it had program reforms. That’s just the reality,” said Arrington, who led the charge to create a bipartisan fiscal commission to address government debt.
In January, 19 GOP members of the Budget Committee and three Democrats voted for a proposal to establish the commission, which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) supported.
Both sides of the political aisle are already attacking the commission. Following the Budget Committee’s vote to establish the commission, Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett (Texas) said: “There is a real concern out there that this commission will be called the ‘Cut Social Security Commission.’” A group of conservative organizations released a letter attacking the commission as a “trap designed to get Republican fingerprints on a tax increase in exchange for ‘spending cuts’ that never materialize.”
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