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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (341284)	1/10/2003 10:08:17 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Tax cuts - 'fairly' implemented - are nearly always a good thing. We are 'over taxed'. We also suffer from an obscene, overly complicated, loophole-ridden, special interest perverted tax code which imposes very high compliance costs on all participants. There is something to be said for the Republicans current push for "dynamic scoring" (adjusting the expected budgetary impact of tax law changes to incorporate the idea that lower taxes will produce faster growth... thus, ameliorating part of the hit to the budget from the lost revenues). This is based upon the 'Lafer Curve', famous from the Reagan years. The only problem is: no one knows what the economic effect is for a given dollar of tax relief (especially since it depends a great deal upon who gets that dollar), and no economist has yet put forth an accepted mathematical basis for assuming a given 'revenue flow-back' at any given point on the Lafer Curve. Naturally, since no one agrees on the math, this opens the floodgates to massive 'smoke and mirrors' budget assumptions... and lying to the public is something politicians have become very good at. Any adoption of some sort of dynamic scoring assumption must include a requirement to revisit the predictions after the REAL economic numbers come in... and adjust the formula assumptions to correct for the mistakes, and so that we can gradually piece together the truth of the matter. No politician I've yet heard from wants to do that: inject the real scientific method into their 'party games'. It too easy to claim that whatever tax change you want to make is going to result in 'pie in the sky' for everyone, and economic nirvana... knowing full well that when the true results are in, said politician is likely to be safely retired. Sen. John Breaux seems to be addressing another hard fact when he says: "Tax cuts are not free". Since - even under the most optimist assumptions used by the 'dynamic scoring crowd', that only part of the revenue lost by a tax cut would be returned by higher economic growth - our real and fast growing deficit still remains a problem. Only the other half of the budget equation can restore balance: spending must be cut! This is the hard choice that politicians seem to always fail at making. This Bush II administration is growing into one of the worst in this regard. They have made no serious moves at cutting or restraining government spending. In fact, they are spending like drunken sailors on shore leave, fast approaching the point where they can be accused of replicating the crippling mistakes made by our last 'Texas' President, LBJ... who increased federal spending ('war on poverty' and war in Vietnam) without regard for the impact on the budget, and without making the hard choices necessary to pay for these programs. This led us directly into a decade of stagflation. Only time will tell what particular variety of economic disaster is being brewed up by the current mix of similarly unbalanced spending....