Comment by LorenPechtel

Because long ago the politicians got this "brilliant" idea of requiring many things to not increase the deficit.

The result has been things that cost money are "balanced" by raising taxes somewhere--but politicians don't want to raise taxes. Thus we get all sorts of garbage that fiddles with the details without "raising" taxes, but "raises" revenue--often by pulling it forward rather than actually changing the total amount.

We have also seen a lot of things that employers used to simply pay changed to income for the employee but deductible--but that causes the FICA taxes to be paid in all cases and since an awful lot of employees aren't in a position to itemize those deductions are lost. Something that was tax free now becomes income, but they didn't "raise" taxes.

I'd like to take the idiotic idea and stand it on it's head: I would not permit *any* measure to fund itself. A measure would either be a tax bill or a spending bill, it would be prohibited for a bill to do both. That would remove much of the drive to create insanities like this and Congress could work on cleaning up all the garbage. To accomplish this, though, we will have to evict all those idiots who "promised" never to raise taxes (but are perfectly willing to vote for stealth increases that cause a lot more pain per $ raised than doing it honestly would.)