Bush Feeling Heat On Economy

CBSNEWS ^ | Monday, September 10, 2001

[JohnHuang2]

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10, 2001

AP

(CBS) With gloom about the economy only deepening, President Bush is facing mounting pressure to do something now to stop the slide. Republicans, worried about political repercussions from the struggling economy, are floating a perennial favorite – new tax cuts – starting with chopping the capital gains rate from 20 to 15 percent.

"I think we should have a capital gains tax rate cut. It would have an immediate effect on the economy," said Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.

Reducing the capital gains tax on investments would open Republicans to charges of helping the rich, reports CBS News Correspondent Stephanie Lambidakis. So Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., is also pushing a cut in the social security payroll tax, which is paid by both employers and workers.

"Maybe we should have a temporary reduction in social security taxes…. That's a middle-income tax cut, that's for anybody who makes up to $80,000," said Nickles on CBS News' "Face the Nation."

Democrats, meantime, are pushing the president to rescind parts of his tax cut and resubmit his budget to reflect the disappearing surplus.

Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Sunday that the nation needs a budget that has "numbers in it that are real." He also said there is little Democrats can do without Mr. Bush's support.

"There is nothing that we Democrats can do by ourselves because we have only a one-vote margin in the Senate and he has a veto pen," Kerry said on "Face the Nation." He also said it was clear the Bush budget would mean taking money from the Social Security surplus.

White House officials have said the tightening economy just puts more pressure on Congress to spend prudently. The administration is considering calling for across-the-board budget cuts next year if the economy worsens, Bush advisers said last week.

Democrats blame Mr. Bush's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut for the nation's economic woes and suggest Social Security reserves are in jeopardy.

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Projections by both the White House Office of Management and Budget and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office show that the non-Social Security part of the nation's budget surplus essentially has evaporated.

Since Congress returned to work after Labor Day, Democrats and the administration have been fighting over who is responsible for the economic rut.

The nation's unemployment rate grew to 4.9 percent in August as job losses in manufacturing passed 1 million for the yearlong slowdown. The increase in the monthly jobless rate was the biggest in six years.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said administration actions are directly responsible for the current downturn and getting the economy back on track is the president's job.

"It's not really our responsibility to offer a way out of the Bush economy," said the South Dakota Democrat. "It's the president that got us to this situation, and I think it's the president that needs to lead us out."

The Democratic strategy, says political columnist E.J. Dionne, is to let the White House take the heat for now.

"I think in the short run, Democrats want to take as much time as they can holding Bush accountable without having to put something on the table themselves," Dionne said.

©MMI, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

For Education And Discussion Only. Not For Commercial Use.

[JohnHuang2]

The din of the doomsayers

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Everywhere, you can hear the din of the doomsayers -- an oddball bunch who draw from the grimness an obdurate contentment and satiation; like a clump of fortune tellers, with fiery eyes and scowling brows plumbing the depths of their crystal balls, they herald darkness and despair.

"U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT JUMPS", proclaimed CNN, barely containing their glee as Friday's employment report was announced.

"UNEMPLOYMENT RATE JUMPS TO 4.9%", screamed CBSNEWS' MarketWatch website.

To hear the prophets of gloom and doom tell it, America is finished.

An economic curse has descended upon us, say the soothsayers of sorrow with melancholy tongues.

Our cornucopic days of roaring opulance and riches are behind us, forever lost, as misery and indigence awaits us.

In the minds of lefties, images of soup kitchens and unemployment lines stretching as far as the eye could see dance in waves of enchantment, as the rush of adrenalin transports them to Nirvana's very embrace.

Exaggeration and hyperbole, you say?

Some might think so.

But think again.

For, behind the long faces of solemnity with each new jolt in the unemployment rate; the feigned expressions of shock at the almost daily carnage on Wall Street, lies a thinly disguised narcissistic conceit, a ray of comfort, borne of a sense of "vindication", somehow.

Whether the gloomers and doomers admit it or not, their destructive resentment of wealth and achievement -- their implacable envy and pitiless grudge -- drives them to relish the bad news.

Donning their phony "populist" facade, the mission is to spread panic, to whip up hysteria into a lather, in hopes of provoking a mass stampede for the exits.

Their ultimate goal? A glaringly apparent desire to undermine confidence and faith in America itself; to cast a pall on Reagan's 'Shining City on a Hill'.

But here's something for the namby-pambys to chew on: America is coming back.

The notion that the most vibrant economy in the world can not and will not ever recover, that our people are condemned to slouch perennially in abysmal morass is the stuff -- not of realists -- but of cowards and milquetoasts.

American capitalism is irrepressible -- a pulsating force of unbridled dynamism; the focus -- not of evil -- but of boundless envy, the world over.

It survived the Carter administration -- what more need be said?

From the beginning of the year, the sequence of events remarkably parallel the situation Reagan inherited in 1980, differing only in degrees of severity.

Then -- as now -- the incoming GOP president grappled with the mess his predecessor so thoughtfully left behind.

And, then -- as now -- the fiercely disloyal opposition, unrestrained by notions of shame nor decorum -- were on the warpath as ever, attempting to blame the incumbent.

Little did the miscreant fools realize they unwittingly set the stage for Reagan to accrue all the credit when the economy came roaring back.

Fasten your seatbelts: History is about to repeat itself.

My two cents..
"JohnHuang2"