| Tax Cuts &
The Economy
Middle-class
Life Under Bush: Less Affordable, Less Secure
According to new data from the Internal Revenue
Service only 30 of the nation's thousands of millionaires were subject
to a face-to-face IRS audit in 2005. (here)
(National Debt Clock here:
Scary!)
( Government's Own Debt Calculations: To the Penny! Right HERE!!
[Do They Really Make Numbers This Big??])
(National
Debt Graphs! Here!)
(Full story here)
Just Double The Bad News, Then Cut It In Half!
Tom Delay's Tenuous Handle on Reality
GOP Big Spenders
Evil and Ugly Cheney's Wallet Gets Fatter With Tax Cuts
Who Benefits--Really?
Molly Ivins/Stupid Tax Cuts
Tax Cuts Fun Facts
Your Tax Dollars Fun Facts
Who Really Pays for Tax Cuts?
Dooh Nibor Economics
Budgets of Mass Destruction
You Pay For My Nice Lear Jet Trips, Thank
You!
The War Against the Poor
A Touch of Class
Just Say Jobs
Ah, the splendors
of the Bush economy:
The nation’s poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population
last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau
said.
The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.
Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1
million people from 2003....
The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million
people lived under the threshold — 11.3 percent of the population.
The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million
to 45.8 million. (here)
In Plan to Reduce Deficit,
White House Turns to Old Projections
To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to
cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing
a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit
the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security.
To make Mr. Bush's goal easier to reach, administration officials
have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit
they predicted last February rather than last year's actual shortfall
of $413 billion.
By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has
already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory
if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.
But White House budget planners are not stopping there. Administration
officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising
tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr.
Bush's five-year budget window.
As in past years, the budget will exclude costs for the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, which could reach $100 billion in 2005 and
are likely to remain high for years to come. The budget is also
expected to exclude Mr. Bush's goal to replace Social Security in
part with a system of private savings accounts, even though administration
officials concede that such a plan could require the government
to borrow $2 trillion over the next decade or two.
Many analysts are dubious about the long-term plan. "I've been
watching this more than 30 years, and I have never seen anything
quite this egregious," said Stanley Collender, a longtime author
on budget issues and a senior vice president at Financial Dynamics,
a communications firm in Washington. (here)
DELAY IN DENIAL: Majority
Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) didn't let nasty facts get in the way of
his tax cutting mantra. Without any apparent justification, DeLay
said that "if we had not cut taxes, we would have less money
than we have today." In fact, if DeLay had studied the President's
own budget document, he would see Table S-3, which shows that if
Congress had not enacted the massive tax cuts, the budget would
be back in surplus but with the tax cuts, massive deficits extend
indefinitely. Delay's quote: (here)
Our President's very own table: here.
A graphic and easy-to-understand example of how the deficit is mostly
due to tax cuts and NOT to congressional spending is here.
Hey,
Big Spenders
Which party deserves the big spender rap? A USA Today analysis of
state legislative actions for the past five years says it's the
GOP.
Legislatures controlled by Republicans increased spending an average
of 6.54 percent per year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17 percent
for legislatures run by Democrats. The Dems appear to have become
the true fiscal conservatives -- that is, people who like their
state budgets balanced. (here)
Cheney's
Wallet: Bigger Tax cuts have helped Cheney and President
Bush personally: In 2003 alone, Cheney pocketed an extra $11,000
in new tax cuts, while President Bush took home a cool $31,000.
It is also true that the tax cuts lined the pockets of many
members of Congress and the super-wealthy. But as the Washington
Post reports, a solid 71 percent of Americans say they have received
no tax cuts at all.
Who Will
Actually Receive the Tax Cuts?
88 percent of Americans will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal
taxes as a result of Bush's tax cuts. The average amount these Americans
will save is $4. (here)
The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center has
analyzed who will benefit from the tax cuts in 2011 if they are
made permanent. (All of the tax cuts would be fully in effect
in 2011, including repeal of the estate tax.)
•The one percent of households with the highest incomes would
receive nearly one-third of the tax cuts.This amounts to an average
tax cut of $58,220 for members of this group. (All figures
here are expressed in 2004 dollars and reflect the effects of making
permanent both the individual income tax cuts and estate tax repeal.)
•The top five percent of households would receive 47 percent
— or nearly half — of the tax cuts, a larger share than
the bottom 90 percent of households would receive.
•Households in the middle fifth of the income spectrum would
receive just over 7 percent of the tax cuts; they would get an average
tax cut of $655.
•The top one percent would see its after-tax income grow by
7.3 percent as a result of the tax cuts. In contrast, the after-tax
incomes of those in the middle of the income spectrum would grow
by only 2.5 percent.
(here) and (here)
Stupid Tax Cut (Molly Ivins)
The Bushies have various ways of justifying this monstrosity,
none of which holds up under scrutiny. The first claim is that the
rich pay more in taxes in the first place. Well, yeah, they do:
They have more money. The richest 1 percent have 18 percent of all
the pretax income and they pay 36 percent of all personal income
taxes. But one of the many disingenuous tricks with statistics you
will see used by the Soak the Poor school is to ignore the rest
of the tax burden. Most of us actually pay more in payroll taxes
than we do in income taxes, but FICA taxes cut OFF at $87,000 --
you make more than that, you don't have to pay on the rest. And
of course the sales tax is notoriously regressive -- rich families
and poor families alike pay the same sales tax on a refrigerator,
but it's a much bigger chunk of the income of the poor family.
The centerpiece of the Bush tax cuts is eliminating dividend taxes,
effective immediately, on the grounds that the dividends are "taxed
twice" -- by the corporate income tax and then the dividend
tax. This one has absolutely nothing to do with economic stimulus,
it's a pure give-away to the rich.
One reason dividends should be taxed is because the people who
get them don't work for the money. In the old days, people who lived
off their investments were known as "coupon clippers"
and generally despised as non-working parasites. Granted, it takes
some smarts to do well enough in the stock market to live high (and
somebody, like your granddaddy, had to make the money in the first
place), but the fact is most investors don't spend their lives poring
over company prospectuses -- they pay someone else to do it. They're
making money off other people's labor. Why shouldn't they pay taxes
on it?
The final reason it's dumb to cut taxes for the rich is the problem
of social justice. We're already in trouble because the income gap
between the rich and the rest of us keeps getting worse and worse.
The rich buy their way out of our public institutions -- schools,
hospitals, parks -- and then contribute money to politicians who
let the public infrastructure go to hell. It doesn't work. (here)
Winners, losers/Who
pays for Bush tax cuts?
(From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
Since his first days as a presidential candidate, George W. Bush
has been remarkably cavalier about how to pay for his massive program
of tax cuts.
In early 2000 he said federal surpluses would suffice to pay for
new spending and huge tax reductions, a prediction that proved to
be wrong just one year later. Last year, his cabinet secretaries
toured the nation promising that the economy would grow its way
out of deficits. But today not even the White House forecasts show
any such thing.
This year Bush pledged to cut the federal deficit in half by 2009
-- omitting the fact that budget deficits would start growing again
the very next year.
Now reality is sinking in, and it's ugly. In a major scoop last
month, the Washington Post reported that the White House has circulated
a memo ordering all federal agencies to prepare substantial budget
cuts for fiscal year 2006. The Department of Veterans Affairs would
lose the entire increase it's getting this year, and more, leaving
it with less money than it had last year. The Education Department
would lose almost every penny of this year's increase to pay for
No Child Left Behind. The National Institutes of Health, a Bush
priority, would get less money in 2006 than in 2005. Funding for
Head Start and infant nutrition also would take major hits.
Even this does not present the full picture, for the cuts spelled
out in the White House budget memo won't nearly suffice to close
the government's projected budget gap.
So a trio of respected Washington think tanks decided to do the
arithmetic themselves. Their report, "The Ultimate Burden of
the Tax Cuts," was released last week by the Brookings Institution,
the Urban Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Bottom line: Four out of five American households will be worse
off over the coming decade when you count both the tax cuts they
receive and the government services they will lose. Only the top
fifth of households -- those earning more than $76,000 annually
-- will be net winners from the Bush program. In other words, tax
cuts that already were heavily weighted to the affluent turn out
even worse when you consider how they will be paid for.
The think-tank economists started out by totaling the cost, $3.9
trillion, of two major tax cuts proposed by Bush and passed by Congress
in 2001 and 2003. They ask what it would cost to pay for those tax
cuts, either through cuts in federal services, such as college loans
and job training, or through a combination of spending cuts and
other tax increases.
In the first scenario, a household in the middle of the income distribution
will get an annual tax cut of $652 from the Bush plan but will lose
$1,520 in government services, for a net loss of $869 per year.
A taxpayer in the bottom fifth of the income distribution gets $19
in tax cuts per year, while losing $1,520 in federal services, for
a net loss of $1,502. Only households in the top fifth of the income
distribution come out net winners, with net income gains of a whopping
$3,934 per year.
Selling his tax cuts on the speaking circuit, Bush has said time
and again, "It's your money," an irresistibly appealing
line. That was true when Washington was running budget surpluses.
But now that Americans have to pay for those tax cuts -- either
by forgoing education, veterans' benefits, scientific research and
other federal services, or by passing a huge federal debt to their
children -- the appeal is not so irresistible.
Dooh Nibor Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Recently The Washington Post got hold of an Office of Management
and Budget memo that directed federal agencies to prepare for post-election
cuts in programs that George Bush has been touting on the campaign
trail. These include nutrition for women, infants and children;
Head Start; and homeland security. The numbers match those on a
computer printout leaked earlier this year — one that administration
officials claimed did not reflect policy.
Beyond the routine mendacity, the case of the leaked memo points
us to a larger truth: whatever they may say in public, administration
officials know that sustaining Mr. Bush's tax cuts will require
large cuts in popular government programs. And for the vast majority
of Americans, the losses from these cuts will outweigh any gains
from lower taxes.
It has long been clear that the Bush administration's claim that
it can simultaneously pursue war, large tax cuts and a "compassionate"
agenda doesn't add up. Now we have direct confirmation that the
White House is engaged in bait and switch, that it intends to pursue
a not at all compassionate agenda after this year's election.
That agenda is to impose Dooh Nibor economics — Robin Hood
in reverse. The end result of current policies will be a large-scale
transfer of income from the middle class to the very affluent, in
which about 80 percent of the population will lose and the bulk
of the gains will go to people with incomes of more than $200,000
per year.
I can't back that assertion with official numbers, because under
Mr. Bush the Treasury Department has stopped releasing information
on the distribution of tax cuts by income level. Estimates by the
Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which now
provides the numbers the administration doesn't want you to know,
reveal why. This year, the average tax reduction per family due
to Bush-era cuts was $1,448. But this average reflects huge cuts
for a few affluent families, with most families receiving much less
(which helps explain why most people, according to polls, don't
believe their taxes have been cut). In fact, the 257,000 taxpayers
with incomes of more than $1 million received a bigger combined
tax cut than the 85 million taxpayers who make up the bottom 60
percent of the population.
Still, won't most families gain something? No — because the
tax cuts must eventually be offset with spending cuts.
Three years ago George Bush claimed that he was cutting taxes to
return a budget surplus to the public. Instead, he presided over
a move to huge deficits. As a result, the modest tax cuts received
by the great majority of Americans are, in a fundamental sense,
fraudulent. It's as if someone expected gratitude for giving you
a gift, when he actually bought it using your credit card.
The administration has not, of course, explained how it intends
to pay the bill. But unless taxes are increased again, the answer
will have to be severe program cuts, which will fall mainly on Social
Security, Medicare and Medicaid — because that's where the
bulk of the money is.
For most families, the losses from these cuts will far outweigh
any gain from lower taxes. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests
that 80 percent of all families will end up worse off; the Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities will soon come out with a more careful,
detailed analysis that arrives at a similar conclusion. And the
only really big beneficiaries will be the wealthiest few percent
of the population.
Does Mr. Bush understand that the end result of his policies will
be to make most Americans worse off, while enriching the already
affluent? Who knows? But the ideologues and political operatives
behind his agenda know exactly what they're doing.
Of course, voters would never support this agenda if they understood
it. That's why dishonesty — as illustrated by the administration's
consistent reliance on phony accounting, and now by the business
with the budget cut memo — is such a central feature of the
White House political strategy. (here)
Budgets
of Mass Destruction
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN NY Times
It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team
is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in
Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based
plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts
to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what
matters in politics and economics are conviction and will —
not facts, social science or history.
The Bush team's real vulnerability is its B.M.D. — Budgets
of Mass Destruction, which have recklessly imperiled the nation's
future, with crazy tax-cutting and out-of-control spending. The
latest report from the Congressional Budget Office says the deficit
is expected to total some $2.4 trillion over the next decade —
almost $1 trillion more than the prediction of just five months
ago. That is a failure of intelligence and common sense that threatens
to make us all insecure — and people also feel that in their
guts.
As Peter Peterson, the former Nixon commerce secretary and a longtime
courageous advocate of fiscal responsibility, puts it in "Running
on Empty," his forthcoming book: "In the 1980 election,
Ronald Reagan galvanized the American electorate with that famous
riff: `I want to ask every American: Are you better off now than
you were four years ago?' Perhaps some future-oriented presidential
candidate should rephrase this line as follows: `I want to ask every
American, young people especially: Is your future better off now
than it was four years ago — now that you are saddled with
these large new liabilities and the higher taxes that must eventually
accompany them?' "
"Quite simply," argues Mr. Peterson, "those bell-bottomed
young boomers of the 1960's have fully matured. The oldest of them,
born in 1946, are only six years away from the median age of retirement
on Social Security (63). As a result, our large pension and health
care benefit programs will soon experience rapidly accelerating
benefit outlays. . . . Thus, at a time when the federal government
should be building up surpluses to prepare for the aging of the
baby boom generation, it is engaged in another reckless experiment
with large and permanent tax cuts. America cannot grow its way out
of the kinds of long-term deficits we now face. . . . The odds are
growing that today's ballooning trade and fiscal deficits, the so-called
twin deficits, will someday trigger an explosion that causes the
economy to sink — not rise."
The same Bush folks who assured us Saddam had W.M.D. now assure
us these budgets of mass destruction don't matter. Sure. "During
the Vietnam War," notes Mr. Peterson, "conservatives relentlessly
pilloried Lyndon Johnson for his fiscal irresponsibility. But he
only wanted guns and butter. Today, so-called conservatives are
out-pandering L.B.J. They must have it all: guns, butter and tax
cuts."
This is so irresponsible and it will end in tears. Remember, says
Mr. Peterson, long-term tax cuts without long-term spending cuts
are not tax cuts. They are "tax deferrals" — with
the burden to be borne by your future or your kid's future. Full
story here.
The Loophole Artists
(David Cay Johnston)
NY Times Magazine
America has two tax systems, separate and unequal.
One is for wage earners, and most of us know firsthand that that
system works effectively. The other is for the wealthy, who control
much of what the I.R.S. knows about their finances and who in recent
years have paid a shrinking share of their incomes to sustain the
civilization that makes their riches possible. Few of us also know
that this means that the 400 Americans who reported the biggest
incomes in 2000 paid just 22.3 cents out of each dollar in federal
income taxes. That is about the rate paid by a single person making
$125,000.
Wealth is more concentrated in America than at any time since 1929.
Tax specialists like Matt Blattmachr (interviewed for this story)
have done their part, but the tax code itself -- written and approved
by Congress -- also stacks the deck. Consider just a few examples.
Hidden in a 1985 law was a subsidy for cushy executive transportation.
Senior executives aren't charged for personal trips on company jets,
but they must pay income tax on the value of the flight, which is
counted as income, just like salary and bonus. The value of the
flight, however, is not based on actual costs but on a formula required
by Congress, one that discounts the value so deeply that it makes
personal use of a company jet more attractive than any other form
of pay. It allows a C.E.O. to travel in a corporate jet coast to
coast for $260. But the company gets to take a tax deduction on
the jet, thus removing funds from the federal treasury. The cost
to taxpayers for that coast-to-coast flight is thus at least $3,500.
(Full article here)
Budget cuts that hurt poor provide tax cuts for rich
By DAVID BRODER
I am about to conduct class warfare - not because it's my ideological
preference but because the facts compel it.
Neither the House nor the Senate budget truly addresses the needs
of the nation. Neither one has the degree of fiscal discipline needed
in a country at war and mired in a struggling economy. Either one
would add close to $2 trillion to the national debt over the next
10 years.
But there is a big difference between the two versions. The House
budget provides twice as big a tax cut, principally for affluent
Americans, as does the Senate. And the House version would deal
low-income Americans, particularly children, a much heavier blow.
If the House version - or something close to it - prevails, expect
dire consequences for many Americans.
The House budget, passed by a three-vote margin on a virtually straight
party-line roll call, would require Congress to cut entitlement
programs by $265 billion over the next decade. (Cuts are measured
against the current service levels, adjusted for inflation.)
But because the House budget assumes no cuts are allowed in Social
Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and veterans retirement
benefits, the private Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates
that at least $165 billion would have to come out of low-income
programs.
The biggest hit would be in the Medicaid program that provides health
care for low-income families and nursing home care for many of the
elderly. Other targets would be child care and children's health
insurance programs.
Medicaid is a shared responsibility of federal and state governments,
and the states have been asking Washington for more help for the
past two years. With drug prices rising and the slow economy making
private health insurance unaffordable for more and more families,
state Medicaid spending has been running out of control.
As they face their own budget crises this year, almost every state
is being forced to drop people from Medicaid, to cut their services
or to do both in a desperate bid to trim spending to match declining
revenue.
The National Association of State Budget Officers says the states
have to close a $29 billion gap in their current-year budgets and
fill an $82 billion hole for next year. The Kaiser Commission on
Medicaid says every state but one has made cuts or announced plans
to trim Medicaid.
Rather than throw a lifeline to the states and these people, the
House budget would cut federal funding for Medicaid by $92 billion
and also reduce other vital programs. Veterans' benefits are slated
to take a $14 billion hit. A similar cut is required for the earned
income tax credit, a subsidy for the working poor. Food stamps would
be reduced by $13 billion, school lunch and other child nutrition
programs by $6 billion. There are also multibillion-dollar reductions
in store for such programs as foster care and adoption assistance
and child support enforcement.
And what is driving all this? Room must be made, House Republicans
insist, for the full $726 billion tax cut that President Bush wants
to add this year to the massive cut he pushed through Congress -
in a time of supposed surpluses - in 2001. The Senate voted to limit
the new tax cut to $350 billion, still an extravagance but not one
so large as to force these reductions in low-income programs. The
trade-off involves Bush's proposal to eliminate taxes on most dividends
- an additional benefit that, it is estimated, will help bring the
promised tax cuts for millionaires to the nice round sum of $90,000
a year.
What kind of values would say it's more important to help the rich?
(here)
A Touch of Class
by Paul Krugman/NY Times
A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar. Then Bill Gates
walked in. "Hey, we're rich!" shouted the conservative.
"The average person in this bar is now worth more than a billion!"
"That's silly," replied the liberal. "Bill Gates
raises the average, but that doesn't make you or me any richer."
"Hah!" said the conservative, "I see you're still
practicing the discredited politics of class warfare."
Am I caricaturing the debate? Alas, not at all. Whenever anyone
points out the systematic tilt of the Bush administration toward
the rich, the administration and its defenders immediately raise
the cry of "class warfare." Yet when you look at the arguments
the administration actually makes on behalf of its policy, they
are as silly as that of the conservative in the bar. The difference
is that the administration knows exactly what it's doing.
For example: On Saturday, in his weekly radio address, George W.
Bush declared that "the tax relief I propose will give 23 million
small-business owners an average tax cut of $2,042 this year."
That remark is intended to give the impression that the typical
small-business owner will get $2,000. But as the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities points out, most small businesses will get
a tax break of less than $500; about 5 million of those 23 million
small businesses will get no break at all. The average is more than
$2,000 only because a small number of very wealthy businessmen will
get huge tax cuts.
So the latest round of Bush tax cuts, like the previous round,
mainly provides benefits to the very, very well off - and once again
the administration is shamelessly misrepresenting the content of
its own policies.
Meanwhile, let's look at what the administration isn't doing. It's
not allocating enough money to meet its own goals for homeland security,
or to provide adequate funding for Medicare. It has scaled back
promised pay increases for the military. It's not providing a penny
in aid to desperate state governments - it isn't even helping them
meet the new burden of homeland security spending mandated from
Washington. (Remember those promises, after Sept. 11, of aid to
fire departments and police? That was then.)
And bear in mind that the budget deficits of state and local governments
are forcing cuts in medical care for the poor and public services
for everyone. Many states, even those with Republican governors,
will be forced to raise taxes too - but the burden of those increases
will fall on the middle class, not the rich.
The only beneficiaries of the latest Bush plan will be those who
receive tax cuts big enough to offset all these negatives. Those
beneficiaries are the usual suspects - the same small, wealthy minority
that got the big benefits from the last tax cut. Does pointing this
out constitute class warfare?
The administration and its defenders will, of course, insist that
it does - because that charge helps confuse the public about what's
really going on. But for the record: When people like me stress
how few Americans will gain from the Bush plan, we're not talking
about envy; we're talking about priorities. (here)
Jobs, Jobs,
Jobs
by Paul Krugman New York Times (here)
Did you know that President Bush's economic plan will create 1.4
million jobs? Oh, and did I mention that the plan will create 1.4
million jobs? And don't forget, the plan will create 1.4 million
jobs.
Republican politicians are obviously under instructions to push
that job number. On the Sunday talk shows some of them said "1.4
million jobs" so often that it sounded like an embarrassing
nervous tic.
Of course, there's no reason to take that number seriously.
Basically, the job-creation estimate came from the same place where
Joseph McCarthy learned that there were 57 card-carrying Communists
in the State Department. Still, let's pretend that the Bush administration
really thinks that its $726 billion tax-cut plan will create 1.4
million jobs. At what price would those jobs be created?
By price I don't just mean the budget cost; I also mean the cost
of sacrificing other potential pro-employment policies on the altar
of tax cuts. Once you take those sacrifices into account, it becomes
clear that the Bush plan is actually a job-destroying package.
Not that the budget cost is minor. The average American worker earns
only about $40,000 per year; why does the administration, even on
its own estimates, need to offer $500,000 in tax cuts for each job
created? If it's all about jobs, wouldn't it be far cheaper just
to have the government hire people? Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress
Administration put the unemployed to work doing all kinds of useful
things; why not do something similar now? (Hint: this would be a
good time to do something serious, finally, about port security.)
The answer is that we can't have a modern version of the W.P.A.
because, um . . . because tax cuts are essential to promote long-run
economic growth. Yes, that must be it. Just look at a new study
by the Congressional Budget Office, now headed by an economist handpicked
by the Bush administration. It concludes that the Bush plan may
have either a positive or a negative effect on long-run growth,
but that in any case the effect will be small. Wait, that's not
the answer we wanted. Quick, find another expert!
Meanwhile, the United States is in effect about to run a W.P.A.
program in reverse. That is, as a nation we're about to reduce spending
on basic needs like education, health care and infrastructure by
at least $100 billion, maybe more. And these spending cuts —
the result of the fiscal crisis of the states — amount to
a job destruction program bigger than any likely positive effects
of the Bush tax cut.
Until recently it has been hard to get people excited about the
states' worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. For about
two years state governments were able to use fancy financial footwork
to put off the full effects, and the public probably regarded warnings
about looming catastrophe as exaggerated. But now, as Timothy Egan
reported yesterday in The New York Times, states are "withdrawing
health care for the poor and mentally ill. They are also dismissing
state troopers, closing parks and schools, dropping bus routes,
eliminating college scholarships and slashing a host of other services."
Not to mention unscrewing every third light bulb in Missouri government
offices. (Honest.)
Aside from their cruelty and their adverse effect on the quality
of life, these cuts will be a major drag on the national economy.
So if the administration really cared about jobs, it would provide
an emergency package of aid to state governments — not to
pay for new spending, but simply to maintain basic services. How
about $78 billion — the same sum just allocated for the Iraq
war?
Oh, never mind. Anything that would distract from the tax-cut message
is out of the question. In fact, rather than compromise on its goal
of maximum long-run tax cuts for the wealthy, the administration
now says that it's willing to phase tax cuts in gradually —
making them even less effective as an economic stimulus.
So when you take the policy consequences into account, it's clear
that the administration's tax-cut obsession isn't just busting the
budget; it's also indirectly destroying jobs by preventing any rational
response to a weak economy. In its determination to stay on message,
the administration is also determined not to do anything that would
actually help ordinary families.
But did I mention that the Bush tax plan will create 1.4 million
jobs?
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