Having recently been clobbered on all fronts. The left will begin their war anew, from home base:
<<Saturday September 22 11:36 AM ET
Democrats Warn Against Tax Cuts with War Looming
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of centrist Democrats is warning against another round of U.S. tax cuts, saying the nation needs all the revenues it can get to finance a sustained military effort against international groups linked to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
``We know of no historical precedent for a country preparing to wage a major war -- an enterprise that inherently requires funding for whatever it takes to win -- beginning by cutting taxes,'' the Democratic Leadership Council said in its weekly newsletter dated Sept. 24.
On Friday, top Republicans and Democrats from congressional tax-writing committees met to discuss a possible tax-cut package to stimulate a U.S. economy that has been stalled since late last year.
In the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York and a portion of the Pentagon outside Washington, the U.S. economy appears to have suffered even further.
Significant job layoffs already have been announced, largely because travel and tourism have nearly ground to a halt in the aftermath of the attack.
Wall Street, which reopened on Monday after being closed several days in the aftermath of the attack, suffered its worst weekly loss since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 14 percent over the past five trading sessions.
House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, a California Republican, indicated on Friday he would not proceed with a new tax-cut package until policy-makers had a better idea about the economic impact of the Sept. 11 attack.
Thomas and other key members of Congress also said they would weigh the likely impact of economic stimulus already in the pipeline, including tax cuts enacted earlier this year and an emergency bailout for the suffering U.S. airline industry.
But the Democratic Leadership Council argued that shoring up domestic security, repairing the damage in New York and Washington and defeating the ``new threat'' to the United States would do more to stimulate the U.S. economy than tax cuts.
The centrist Democratic group, which is led by Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the former vice presidential candidate, particularly criticized some House Republicans' call for a short-term cut in taxes from the sale of stock and other assets.
The group accused those Republicans of hoping to resurrect the long-sought tax cut by ``dressing it up in the red-white-and-blue of a wartime emergency measure and whipping it through Congress.''
Some economists in recent days have warned that a capital gains tax cut could encourage investors to unload even more stock at a time when Wall Street is reeling.>> |
