White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett had a classic “Michael Kinsley Moment” last week: he committed a gaffe by telling the truth.
In a departure from public pronouncements about the federal budget deficit, a senior aide to President Bush said last week that the record deficits have been caused, in part, by tax cuts.
Administration officials have not, in public statements, attributed the rising deficit, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will reach $422 billion this year and the Office of Management and Budget projects $474 billion, to tax cuts.
In “Ask the White House,” an online chat on the White House’s website, Communications Director Dan Bartlett wrote, “The deficit was caused by three things: lost revenue coming into the treasury due to the recession; funding increases to fight the war and protect the homeland; and tax relief to jumpstart our economy.”
It’s that third one that Bush aides aren’t supposed to acknowledge. Sure, it’s true, but White House spin is supposed to ignore reality and insist that tax cuts had nothing to do with deficit. By conceding reality, Bartlett went wildly off message, which is noteworthy, if for no other reason, because he rarely does that.
The White House pretended like this was nothing new.
Administration officials say that Bartlett’s comment is consistent with the administration’s message on tax policy.
Bartlett’s comment has “been said a hundred times,” said Treasury Department spokes-man Rob Nichols.
Nice try, Rob, but that’s not true.
Ever since Bush and Congress started building up these huge deficits, anyone associated with the administration has rejected the very idea that Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy contributed to the biggest deficit in American history.
* On April 24, Bush said in a speech in Canton, Ohio that the war and the recession caused deficits. He declared “Now, you hear talk about deficits. And I’m concerned about deficits. I’m sure you are as well. But this nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war.”
* In a review of Treasury Secretary John Snow’s speeches, he has attributed the deficit to “the extraordinary circumstances of recent history,” such as the recession, corporate scandals, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
* In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, OMB Director Joshua Bolten wrote: “From the left, the president’s tax cuts are blamed for driving the federal budget into deficit,” and he cited the causes of the deficits, including “a stock market collapse and an economy entering recession … corporate scandals, and, of course, terrorism on American soil.”
That’s what makes Bartlett’s comment so unusual. For the first time, a Bush aide said, in public, what is painfully true: Bush’s tax cuts helped create the biggest deficits ever.
Of course, I should add that even Bartlett’s momentary lapse of partial reason wasn’t entirely true. He and other administration officials make it sound like tax cuts, the war, and increased spending were all relative equals in creating the current deficit. That’s not even close to accurate.
Yet the cost of war, though by no means trivial, is responsible for only a small share of the deficits we face. The President’s tax cuts are a much more significant cause. Congressional Budget Office data indicate that in 2003 and 2004, the cost of enacted tax cuts is almost three times as great as the cost of war, even when the cost of increases in homeland security expenditures, the rebuilding after September 11, and other costs of the war on terrorism — including the action in Afghanistan — are counted as “war costs,” along with the costs of the military operations and subsequent reconstruction in Iraq.