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See attached
editorial cartoon by Jack Ohman in today’s Oregonian to fill in the perspective
from this corner of the Pacific Northwest, where unemployment is up to 8%. - KWC Numerically, just don't
try this at home
By David Sarasohn, Associate
Editor, The Oregonian, 05/28/03 @ http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/david_sarasohn/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1054123358167470.xml Say this for the big
economic stimulus tax cut that Congress pushed through just before escaping
Washington for its Memorial Day recess: It may not work, but at least it's
dishonest. The size of the cut is
reported at $318 billion, $320 billion or $350 billion, but it's actually two
or three times that size. Making it look like $350 billion -- basically at the
insistence of Sen. George
Voinovich, R-Ohio,
who said he wouldn't vote for anything higher -- requires the style of
accounting that usually produces not congressional policy but congressional
subpoenas. To find this kind of
fiscal planning, you usually need an e-mail offer from Nigeria. On the other hand, you
have to admit the tax cut is honestly dishonest. The truth that the real bill
was much higher was known, and admitted, by both its opponents and its
supporters. Except, it seems,
Voinovich. The tax cut was
squeezed under $350 billion by promising that virtually every piece of it will
sunset, or lapse, sometime between 2004 and 2008. This is the same strategy
used to pretend that the 2001 tax cut cost less than it really will, and nobody
in Washington expects Congress to let any of the tax cuts in either bill run
out. "The $350
(billion) number takes us through the next two years, basically," House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., told CongressDaily. "But also it could end up being a trillion-dollar cut,
because this stuff is expendable." The Center on Budget
on Policy Priorities in Washington calculates that Hastert has it close to
right, that if the tax cuts last through 2013, the cost will be between $807
billion and $1.06 trillion -- not only more than Voinovich's proclaimed limit
of $350 billion, but more than President Bush's original request of $726
billion. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who also pledged not to vote for a cut
greater than $350 billion, refused to vote for the final package. Voinovich, counting differently, hopped
on. Where everyone else on
both sides sees the sunset provision as a shifty way to avoid real numbers,
Voinovich declared, "I think sunsets are good, because it's going to give
you an opportunity to evaluate whether or not what you're doing really is making
a difference in terms of the economy." Which it might, if
anybody thought that the evaluation was likely to happen. This development could
produce a new ingredient in American political language, like "Read my
lips" or "intern."
This could create the verb "to voinovich," to base your action
on something that everybody but you knows to be wrong. As in, "I couldn't vote for the
NASA budget because the Earth doesn't go around the sun." It's wrong, of course,
to hang this entire dishonesty on the senator from Ohio. Majorities in both houses -- well, half
the Senate plus Vice
President Cheney
-- voted for the tax cut knowing that its numbers were imaginary, knowing that
it would dig a hole two to three times the announced cost. As House Majority Leader Tom DeLay declared breezily, explaining why he
voted for a bill that allegedly had a smaller tax cut that he one supported in
the House, "Numbers don't mean anything." They don't in this
bill. And trying to take its numbers seriously doesn't make any more sense. "Let me get this
straight," mused one tax lawyer, in an e-mail quoted by The Wall Street
Journal. "Under this act the child tax credit will increase to $1,000 for
2003 and 2004 and then revert to present law . . . Meaning in 2003 and 2004,
credit = $1,000, 2005-2008=$700, 2009=$800 and 2010=$1,000. 2011=? You have got
to be kidding." Well, they are. Or, depending on how
you think of it, they're not. Sometime, of course,
Congress and the administration will have to think about real numbers, and face
a deficit rising to explosive proportions, settling there just as the baby
boomer generation approaches Social Security and Medicare. (Tax measures may
not sunset, but people always do.) It's hard to imagine what the people behind
this tax bill plan to do in that situation. Maybe they'll just
voinovich it. |
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