{"id":5307,"date":"2005-09-20T12:56:56","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T16:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5307"},"modified":"2005-09-20T12:56:56","modified_gmt":"2005-09-20T16:56:56","slug":"a-trial-balloon-on-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-trial-balloon-on-taxes\/","title":{"rendered":"A trial balloon on taxes?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Republican establishment is still very much in the midst of a serious internal struggle over how to pay for Katrina relief and recovery. Conservatives want to delay the Medicare expansion by a year, but Bush has rejected the idea<\/a>. Conservatives want the transportation bill back on the table, but Bush isn’t going for that<\/a> either.<\/p>\n

There are, of course, always enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, but the Bush gang won’t even consider<\/a> going there. Or would they<\/a>?<\/p>\n

The recovery from Hurricane Katrina will temporarily sideline some parts of U.S. President George W. Bush’s domestic agenda, including efforts to make the administration’s tax cuts permanent, U.S. Treasury chief John Snow said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

“It’s taken over the national agenda and I think it will for a while,” Snow said of Katrina. “I think it will push to the back burner some issues that otherwise would have been on the agenda now — the estate tax, tax cut permanence, GSEs and other things.” Snow was answering audience questions after a speech to the National Association of Federal Credit Unions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A trial balloon, perhaps? Or more likely, evidence that rumors about Snow’s imminent demise at Treasury are true? Let’s not forget what happened to the last Treasury secretary<\/a> to stray a little from tax-cut orthodoxy.<\/p>\n

Still, I’m going to play optimist today and pretend that Snow’s comments are a good sign. In fact, let’s take his words at face value and follow up on them. If the lavish tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans no longer have to be permanent, then maybe we, as a country, could take a serious look at tax cuts that haven’t even been implemented yet. As Kevin Drum noted<\/a>, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a fine idea<\/a> that would cancel a couple of tax cuts that won’t take effect until 2006. They’re aimed exclusively at families with high incomes, they cost $197 billion, and the White House never even requested the cut.<\/p>\n

Remember, it’s not even a tax increase, just reversing course on a tax cut that hasn’t even happened yet, for a group of people whose taxes have already been cut, repeatedly, over the last five years. What do you say, Republicans?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Republican establishment is still very much in the midst of a serious internal struggle over how to pay for Katrina relief and recovery. Conservatives want to delay the Medicare expansion by a year, but Bush has rejected the idea. Conservatives want the transportation bill back on the table, but Bush isn’t going for that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}