Posted on 09/10/2001 5:18:26 AM PDT by No Truce With Kings
ADVANTAGE BUSH: Mickey Kaus makes a sensible if boring point that the current budget debate is being over-played. Neither Bush's predictions nor even the direst prognostications from outside see the future fiscal situation heading back to the kind of deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s. The most likely scenario is one in which the government is largely starved of much money for the next decade except to finance social security and Medicare (without much of a senior drug benefit). Mickey thinks this is good for Democrats because they can always rescind some of the tax cuts in future years to pay for their spending plans. It's all going according to plan, Mickey reassures his Democratic readers. Really? Already, there's mounting pressure not to raise taxes any further but to reduce them still more. Republicans are pushing for a capital gains tax reduction; Democrats want to see a reduction in the payroll tax. I'd pick the Democratic option myself, since I'd like to see a more even-handed tax cut than the one proposed by Bush. But whoever wins, doesn't this mean a deep change in the debate? A year ago, we faced a Congress spending double the rate of inflation and a candidate Al Gore wanting only modest tax breaks for middle-class heterosexual families and a vast expansion of government spending. Today, we have a big tax cut, neutered spending plans, and perhaps a bigger tax cut coming soon. Yes, you can make the semantic point that Bush wants spending increases as well. But Bush doesn't need to deliver on spending the way the Democrats do. And I'm still not convinced that any tax hikes in the near future - especially in sluggish economic times - can be anything but political poison. What Bush has done is to squash a small and rare window in fiscal history where a real expansion of government for more middle class entitlements was imaginable. Those of us who will paying taxes for decades to come will eventually be grateful we closed that window swiftly. And Bush's sense of priorities in this respect seems retroactively exactly right.
He takes advantage of the way that people consistently underestimate him.
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