Past Haunts Dean on Medicare issue

Boston Globe ^ | Sept. 30, 2003 | Thomas Oliphant

[prairiebreeze]

HAD DICK Gephardt been more politically correct last week, he would have rebuked Howard Dean for standing with Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico on proposed Medicare cutbacks in the 1990s or with then-Representative John Kasich of Ohio. To those bosses of the newly Republican budget committee in Congress, he could have added the GOP revolutionaries running the House Ways and Means Committee -- Bill Archer of Texas and Bill Thomas of California.

[The Electrician]

The fact is that the deficit reduction program enacted in Clinton's first year had already put the country on the right road.

In a strangely unintended fashion, Oliphant gets one thing right. The "deficit reduction program" (which is a laugher - he is too cowardly to call the Clinton/Democrat tax increase a 'tax increase') was but one of many Clinton mis-steps that led to the nation taking the "right road" and electing a Republican-controlled Congress in 1994.

[Pikamax]

bttt

[The Electrician]

Some people would dispute that - although the expected timing between the enaction of the tax hike and any reaction by the long term interest rates is not clear to me (for example, would rates be expected to change in anticipation of the tax hike, contemporaneously with the tax hike, or more than a year after the tax hike, and if it's the latter, how exactly can you find unbiased evidence to link the two strongly?) here's an interesting tidbit from a Cato article:

Actually, the interest rate on 10-year bonds was 5.68 percent in August 1993 when the Clinton tax hike was enacted, but the rate began to rise after the tax hike, reaching 7.96 percent by November 1994. It may be a coincidence, but long-term rates did not begin to fall until Republican advocates of tax reduction won both houses of Congress.