One of the big problems in Greece over the past decade or so is that the government was not honest with its data. Various people assisted in the matter -- including Goldman Sachs with respect to some debt issues -- but ultimately this was a political decision at the highest level. The people running the country decided to conceal the true nature of their budget and their debt. This deception ended up costing the country dearly -- completely undermining its credibility under pressure and making it much harder to turn the fiscal and economic situation around.
Republicans want to cut taxes - there is no secret about that. All four remaining presidential candidates have fiscal proposals with major tax cutting elements. The problem for them and for their congressional colleagues is that we have an honest broker in the fiscal arena -- the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -- that "scores" fiscal proposals according to their likely impact. (The CBO scores official proposals; it does not score candidates - but its approach to scoring is influential and largely followed by others, such as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, CRFB.)
In the modern United States, cutting taxes leads to lower revenue and larger budget deficits. There are no two ways about this -- as Ronald Reagan discovered in the early 1980s.
For more: Simon Johnson: Fiscal Affairs: Making the United States More Like Greece
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