The Real Facts on Bush's Tax-Cuts -- Page 2

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THE REAL FACTS ON GEORGE W'S TAX-CUT PLAN-- Page 2
If You're Wealthy, This Tax-Cut's For YOU!

"By being responsible with our budget, we can earn the trust of the American people." GW Bush Say What! The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the cost of the Bush Tax-Cut Plan to be at least $2.2 trillion, not $1.6 trillion. The same bipartisan Committee estimated the true, non-phase-in cost of the estate tax repeal to be between $410 billion and $662 billion. BNA Tax Report 3/30/01 "They need to review their methodology." Sen. Don Nichols' non-subtle threat to the JCT staff.
"My budget dedicates enough to fund a new prescription drug benefit for low-income seniors. No senior in America should have to choose between buying food and buying prescriptions." GW Bush
REAL FACT: "That applause line brought even Edward Kennedy lumbering to his feet. Understandably, the President omitted the details -- for example, this one: under the benefit he has proposed, a widow living on as little as fifteen thousand dollars a year would get no help until she had already spent six thousand dollars on prescription drugs. That is, ... her 'deductible' would be $115 per week, not per year." New Yorker 3/12/01
Bush's Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson promised that the Medicare surplus will not be diverted to other purposes, even though Bush includes that money in his "contingency fund."
REAL FACT: However he admitted that it really wasn't up to him -- and the Senate blocked a measure that would make Thompson's promise binding.
Bush's Tax-Cut is based on the trickle-down theory: make the rich richer, and a rising tide will lift all boats.... But he has engaged in an elaborate disinformation campaign to to deny that tax cuts will go mainly to the wealthy, and to sell the plan as a short-run stimulus to spending.
"Instead of picking out the striving teacher in the gallery of the House of Representatives last week, it would have been more honest if Mr. Bush had identified the grinning investment banker or multibillionaire land owner. It is the intellectual dishonesty of this approach that is most distressing." Gerard Baker, The London Financial Times.
"Bush has apparently realized that his tax-cut plan won't do anything to help the economy in the near term so he wants additional tax cuts this year. "This will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the budget cost of his plan. You might think that he would admit that this increases the cost of his tax cut, and perhaps he would offer to scale back those future tax cuts. Not a chance: the administration officials claim that tax cuts this year don't affect their arithmetic because their budget is for 2002 through 2011, so what happens this year doesn't count. I am not making this up. The important point is that the estimated cost of the tax cut hasn't exploded because of new information; it has exploded because the original estimates were simply dishonest. Mr. Bush knew from the start that he was misleading the public about the budget impact of his proposals, just as he knows that he is misleading people now about whose taxes will be cut and by how much." Paul Krugman NYT 2/18/01
"George W. Bush's tax cut plan has never been distinctive for its content, which is standard-issue conservatism - big tax cuts for the rich, a few crumbs for middle-class families with children the right age, nothing for the poor. What is distinctive is the way the plan has been sold.... Has any previous administration been quite this shameless about misrepresenting the actual content of its own economic plan?"
"I'm a little worried about a man who tends to stretch the truth in order to get ahead politically." GW Bush 5/5/00 ******************* "Here's a better plan: Write a check for $500 to every man woman and child. A family with 2 children gets $2,000. The advantages: as a one-time deal, it does not mortgage the country's future or rely on surpluses that may not materialize; it puts the money mostly into the hands of people who need it (most of the money in Mr. Bush's plan will end up in the hands of the wealthy, who will buy stock, or take a foreign vacation, or buy a foreign car, not groceries and clothes); it can be done immediately and the stimulus will come now, when it is needed; and it is fair: Everyone (at last) will be treated equally." Alan Schneider. NYT Letters 3/2/01
Here are other better ideas: make eliminating the "marriage penalty" a higher priority (in 1999 some 38 percent of married taxpayers paid more tax because they were married... the average penalty was $1,400); and focus on providing greatly increased incentives (IRA's, 401(k)'s, etc.) to help middle-class Americans save for their retirement.
"For me, here's the biggest argument for using the tax surplus to reduce the debt: We'll need the money for Medicare and Social Security when the boomers retire.... Payroll taxes are a far greater burden on the poor than on the rich. How sad it would be if we cut income taxes, then raised payroll taxes to keep the elderly going." Jane Bryant Quinn 3/18/01
"Republicans continue to justify the tax cut by saying the surplus belongs to the American taxpayer. So whom does the national debt belong to?" Donald Rosenthal NYT Letters 3/2/01
"To me the mystery is why non ideological conservatives, men and women who have made their way in business and professions, should support the extravagant Bush tax plan rather than a more cautious alternative. Sure, they may save some thousands of dollars a year in the short run. But they have so much at risk in a policy that calculatedly underestimates the cost of the tax cuts and endangers the hard-won federal budget surpluses that has opened the way to prosperity." Anthony Lewis, NYT 3/13/01
"Because he's painfully inarticulate at times, many opinion makers concluded that he's not mentally swift. But it turns out he may be substituting cunning for brilliance. He's rattled opponents with a ridiculously huge tax cut that puts the hand-out caboose before the budget engine, mostly helps those who need it least, risks a return to deficit spending, and jeopardizes a number of popular domestic programs. If can sell that irresponsible scheme, the country's biggest dummies live somewhere other than the White House." Marianne Means Cols. Dispatch 3/15/01 ***************** Certainly there is great merit in cutting waste in government. But insisting on a tax-cut plan that primarily benefits the wealthy at the expense of more pressing needs -- like reinforcing Social Security and Medicare and offering incentives for Americans to save for their retirement -- is too obviously a pay-off to big soft-money donors... And an axiom taught at the foremost tax law program in the United States is: Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.... that is well-off taxpayers and big corporations can take advantage of the many nice things provided for them in the 100,000 pages of the IRS Code and Regulations.... but if they get too greedy, they will eventually be slaughtered.... So GW Bush and his supporters should remember that Taxes that are cut by one Congress can -- and often have been -- raised by the next Congress... & Tax breaks that are enjoyed by the few are more vulnerable than breaks enjoyed by the many... at least one the real facts are given to the people

AND FINALLY SPEAKING OF NUTS: "According to Grady Spears, Texas chef and author of "A Cowboy in the Kitchen," the president-elect is loco for bull nuts. The Texas specialty, known by the mercifully euphemistically name of 'calf-fries,' is nothing more and nothing less than a mess of deep-fried bull testes. Chef Spears, who served the dish often for Mr. and Mrs. Bush when the former was governor of Texas, told Wireless Newsflash, "The plates came back pretty empty." Salon 1/11/01

POSTSCRIPT SEPTEMBER 2007: In his book former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan "shows remorse about how Republicans jumped on his endorsement of the 2001 tax cuts to push through unconditional cuts without any safeguards against surprises. He recounts how Mr. Rubin and Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, begged him to hold off on an endorsement because of how it would be perceived.

“It turned out that Conrad and Rubin were right,” he acknowledges glumly. He says Republican leaders in Congress made a grievous error in spending whatever it took to ensure a permanent Republican majority. NYT 09/15/07

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Prepared 03/25/01; Updated 09/14/07
Original material and format only copyright 2001; other material copyright by holders;
see the Elect Hobie Homepage; Distribution encouraged with attribution.