I really have to take my hat off to Ron Brownstein today for coming up with one of my favorite analogies in recent memory.
Brownstein was following up on the budget debate from last week, in which Senate moderates successfully pared down Bush’s tax cut plan, and restored a modicum of sanity to the budget. As I noted last week, the Senate would ideally have the good sense not to cut taxes at all under the current circumstances, but when faced with an embarrassingly humongous tax cut and a merely big tax cut, getting the smaller one was something of a victory.
In his column in today’s LA Times, Brownstein, who has for months appealed for lawmakers to show some responsibility, noted that as far as the deficit is concerned, the smaller cut is the better alternative.
“But only in the sense that it’s better to be hit by a car than a truck,” he wrote.
Brownstein lays out three common sense reasons why more tax cuts (on top of the massive cuts passed in 2001) are a bad idea. One, we’ve already got “mammoth” budget deficits and more tax cuts will mean “huge deficits every year through the next decade.” Two, the deficits that the tax cuts exacerbate are “undermining Washington’s last opportunity to improve its fiscal position before the baby boom’s retirement explodes the cost of Social Security and Medicare.” And three, “cutting taxes during a war…amounts to asking the next generation to fund the national defense through a higher national debt.”
Just for good measure, Brownstein also debunks the idea that these tax cuts will improve the economy — which just happens to be the principal argument of proponents for the cuts’ passage. He notes an analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that “concluded that Bush’s budget was unlikely to have much effect, up or down, on economic growth — and would produce huge federal deficits even under the best growth scenarios.”
And while we’re on the subject, the dean of the Washington press corps, the Post’s David Broder, touched on similar concerns in his column yesterday, calling Bush’s budget one of “dire consequences.”
Broder concedes all of Brownstein’s valid points, but adds some real-life consequences to the discussion by noting that the tax cuts have led Congress to cut federal funding for Medicaid by $92 billion, veterans’ benefits by $14 billion, food stamps by $13 billion, children nutrition programs by $6 billion, and similar cuts in the earned-income tax credit that helps subsidize the working poor.
All the while, these cuts make it easier for Republicans to cut taxes for wealthy Americans, which Broder notes “will help bring the promised tax cuts for millionaires to the nice round sum of $90,000 a year.”
If all this sounds like Robin Hood in reverse to you, then we’re on the same page.