Going through Bush’s State of the Union address, it’s hard to pick out the single most deceptive and cynical manipulation of the truth. There’s just so much to choose from. But in light of some excellent analysis from Kevin Drum, I think there’s some consensus building around this:
“Unless you act, Americans face a tax increase. What Congress has given, the Congress should not take away. For the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent,” Bush said. About a minute later, he added, “In two weeks, I will send you a budget that funds the war, protects the homeland, and meets important domestic needs, while limiting the growth in discretionary spending to less than 4 percent…. By doing so, we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years.”
In a treasure trove of mendacity, this may be uniquely dishonest. We can make the tax cuts permanent, and it might be theoretically possible to cut the deficit in half in five years, but we certainly can’t do both. No matter what your ideology, party affiliation, or predisposition, Bush is simply lying.
Relying on research from the respected Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, it’s objectively obvious how wrong Bush was on Tuesday night.
First, the very idea that Bush wants Congress to limit government spending is absurd hypocrisy. The White House “plan” to cut the deficit intentionally ignores scores of new spending initiatives that Bush demands, including funding for Iraq, increased Defense budgets, Medicare expansion, Social Security privatization, not to mention putting humans on Mars.
Second, if Congress does what Bush asks and makes the tax cuts permanent, after the White House insisted on making them temporary to hide their true cost, the deficit will soar to unprecedented heights (or depths, as the case may be). CBPP scholars estimate that Bush’s tax cuts, if made permanent, would cost the nation an additional $2.5 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”).
“The revenue loss associated with making permanent all of the tax cuts the Administration has indicated it wishes to extend totals $2.2 trillion over the ten years from 2005 through 2014, based on estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office,” the CBPP explained. “The higher interest payments that would have to be paid on the national debt would add another $375 billion to the cost, bringing the total effect on the deficit over the next ten years to $2.5 trillion.”
And who would benefit from these permanent tax cuts? The same Americans who benefit from them now — the very wealthy millionaires and billionaires who didn’t need a tax cut in the first place. From the CBPP report:
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.
* 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.
It’s indefensible. As Drum notes, White House economists have to know the truth about their own plans, so one is left to assume that they realize their plan is a fraud, but they just don’t care.