I keep waiting for the Republican Party to locate an economist for NYT op-ed duty who is of a stature equal to Krugman's and who will be willing to go on record saying that the tax bill isn't disreputable and ridiculous and that Krugman made a mistake in his report of its provisions. They'll surely find somebody, but so far no luck, guys.
In the meantime, this voice from the RIGHT writes, in today's NYT, his observations about the bill. He has utter contempt for it, and the coalition of Repubs and Dems who gave birth to it. Okay, Bush fans, here's what Brooks says:
Substantively, the original Bush plan was ambitious, but it was chewed up in Congress by Republicans and Democrats alike. The bill that has emerged is a hodgepodge of slow-motion phase-ins and phase-outs, exemptions, deductions, and entitlements. Most of the cuts don't take effect for several years, and the whole bill becomes void in 2010. Meanwhile there are so many little goodies that reporters are still combing through and finding them. [Sound familiar to anybody?--E.] As a few economists have noted, rarely has such a big tax cut had so little social effect. Meanwhile, a once-in-a-decade chance at serious tax reform has been blown.
The grubbiest part of the tax cut was foisted on Mr. Bush by the Democrats — the checks that will go out to taxpayers later in the year, at $300 for singles and $600 for married couples. This bit of pump-priming is exactly the sort of thing Reagan Republicans always fought. Instead of rearranging incentives to encourage innovation and production, it encourages more shopping. It treats wealth as a purely material thing: We've got some money. We're going to give it to you. We hope you'll vote for us.
You may have loved supply-siders, or you may have thought they were ideologues and buffoons, but at least they had a theory of how to use fiscal policy for the common good. Every proposal was designed to produce entrepreneurial vigor and creativity. Now what we may be getting in divided Washington is not ideological gridlock but a mishmash of small-scale ideas and freely distributed goodies. In this way the surplus, and the remarkable opportunity it represents, are frittered away.
David Brooks is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, a rightist periodical. The whole piece is at the link below, and its analysis from a right perspective should interest all those who inhabit the World of this thread.
nytimes.com |
