I know it can’t be easy for Bush to try and generate public demand for his tax cut plan. Even voters with a passive familiarity with current events know that the U.S. is running huge deficits, government programs are getting cut, and unless they’re pretty wealthy, they don’t have much more money in their pocket from the last time Bush begged for a tax cut.<\/p>\n
In fact, I suspect some voters wonder where all the great benefits Bush promised from the 2001 round of tax breaks for the wealthy. Where’s the strong economic growth Bush guaranteed? Where are all the new jobs that he said would be created? Where’s the prescription drug benefit and money for education he said we could afford? Why is the administration raiding the Social Security trust fund after promising that wouldn’t happen?<\/p>\n
Multiple polls from a variety of news outlets<\/a> all show similar results — Americans like tax cuts but don’t believe we can afford another one right now. A Washington Post poll<\/a> completed less than a month ago showed that two-thirds of Americans want to see Bush’s tax plan slashed significantly, while about a third of respondents would prefer to see no tax cut at all.<\/p>\n Regardless of how difficult Bush’s political task is, the president is once again taking his message to “the people,” complaining yesterday<\/a> to an audience in Ohio that the Senate plan to cut taxes by $350 billion was just a “little bitty” tax cut plan that was inadequate. (I know Bush has some genuinely talented speech writers, so I’m assuming he came up with “little bitty” on his own.)<\/p>\n Apparently, Bush feels it’s easier to sell snake oil to an unsuspecting public by hedging the truth a bit, too.<\/p>\n While Bush was whining that the Senate’s tax plan was too small, he was also arguing that his $550 billion tax cut plan would produce 1 million jobs in the next year and a half.<\/p>\n “The package needs to be robust, so that we can create more than a million new jobs by the end of 2004,” Bush said<\/a>. “That’s not my projection. That’s the projection of a lot of smart economists who’ve analyzed the package. They believe that if the package is implemented by the United States Congress, of at least $550 billion, more than a million new jobs will be created by the end of ’04.”<\/p>\n Who, exactly, are the “smart economists who analyzed” Bush’s plan? His own team at the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Bush made it sound like independent team of economic scholars reviewed the administration’s plan and concluded it would create over a million new jobs. That’s false. Independent economists have concluded that the administration’s projections are wildly off-the-mark and there’s little chance of Bush’s promises coming true.<\/p>\n