How Tax Cuts Trickle Down

The question has been asked time and time again regarding who would pay for the tax cuts both passed and proposed. This article makes it very clear who that will be. It is us. How do you like it?


How Tax Cuts Trickle Down

[]n a sorry effort to protect President Bush's tax-cut mania, the Republican leaders of Congress have unveiled proposals for slashing the most basic government programs for years to come. With rationalizations running from tragic to ludicrous, House budgeters envision cuts of $470 billion in "waste, fraud and abuse" in Medicare, Medicaid, education, child care and other vital programs, from transportation to health care, the environment to science research. The regressive 10-year plan, matched by an equally hypocritical Senate version, is a triumph of ideological rant over budget reality. Government now must be drastically crimped to pay for the rolling deficits resulting from Mr. Bush's triumphalist rewards for upper-bracket Americans.
The G.O.P. leaders endorse the next chunk of detaxation despite Congressional findings that two-thirds of the deficits running through the decade will be caused by the Bush tax cuts, not simply the failing economy.
The estimated shortfall of $2.7 trillion could have been an $890 billion surplus but for the Bush proposals, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The president's next $1.4 trillion cut, geared to the affluent, will average $90,000 a year for millionaires, according to the Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. You would think a sense of embarrassment might strike the Republicans in blessing such a boon for a fortunate minority while taking a cleaver to programs vital for most taxpayers, notably a woeful $12 billion cut in food stamps. But they seem intent on ideology trumping responsibility.
The contradictions of the Republicans' plans are legion. They intend to somehow cut Medicare by $214 billion this decade even as the president vows $400 billion in prescription help for retirees. A $93 billion Medicaid cut is blithely ordered by lawmakers who do not have enough daring to ask the president about the missing budget costs for the looming Iraq war. The cuts, the largest in history, are mean spirited in the face of the Bush Republicans' deepening embrace of deficit spending. And deficit spending, firmly blessed by the administration, will be the rule once Congress gets beyond this period of public relations budget fantasizing.
The G.O.P. leaders are laying out what is supposed to be a fair outlook of the fiscal future — a budgetary road map for government to find its way beyond hard times. They are leaving a lesson in how to pretend to toughness while rolling the red ink over time's horizon. In the process, the national debt which the president so recently vowed to shrink will balloon from $5 trillion to $12 trillion at the end of his economic "growth" plan, years after he is gone from office.
Commendably, Senate moderates alarmed about their own constituents' reactions are vowing to halve the tax cuts. But nothing short of public furor is an adequate antidote at this point. The moderates who would split the differences of two extremes are likely to be marginalized as the president and House drive an ideological bargain no less fateful as the talk of war.