Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (2040)	6/9/2003 10:39:12 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793917

Democrats' slugfest growing harsher By Thomas Oliphant, BOSTON GLOBE WASHINGTON - ON THE DEMOCRATIC left, the center is now being attacked as slavish to big business, Bush-lite in its approach to policy issues, and unwilling to vigorously take on the president`s abysmal stewardship of domestic affairs - a pale carbon copy of the Republicans. In the Democratic center, the left is being attacked as robots for narrow activist causes, intent on returning to the tax-and-spend, weak-on-defense narrowness that cost the party the White House in the Nixon and Reagan eras. The name-calling is entertaining as well as divisive, but it also obscures a very large issue behind all the antagonism - whether Bill Clinton and then Al Gore were right on the economy or whether their embrace of balanced-budget progressivism should be junked. The clawing and biting appeared to escalate last week. The left - in the form of a packed conference of the liberal Campaign for America's Future - assailed ''middle-of-the road kill,'' to quote a supportive New York Times ad. The center - in another dig from the much less liberal Democratic Leadership Council - suggested its opponents are slowly manufacturing a Bush landslide. A lot of this stuff started just before the war in Iraq - understandably. But it is now expanding to postures on domestic affairs. A lot began with Howard Dean's opposition to the war. But it has expanded to such differences among the presidential candidates as whether to repeal all of the post-2000 income tax cuts (Dean and Dick Gephardt), freeze the tax-cutting as of this year (Joe Lieberman) or attack the tax cuts benefiting those with the highest incomes (John Edwards and John Kerry). Those difference are directly related to their approaches to the health care and insurance mess. With differing ideas, Gephardt and Dean promote universal coverage, while the others favor incremental progress and more emphasis on cost containment for those already insured, tougher action on drug prices, and more investment in the control of costly diseases and medical conditions. Over lunch last week. DLC chairman Al From and the new president (Bruce Reed, Clinton's domestic policy adviser for both terms) made a detailed case that Clinton and Gore were right then and that their ideas are right for next year's campaign. As From put it, Clinton's realization following his election that the budget deficit was dangerously out of control produced tough restraints on spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and more tax breaks for the working poor, as well as targeted investments in economic infrastructure and education. ''The economy, as I recall, did rather well,'' he said, helping sustain a sharp drop in interest rates and a private investment boom. In addition, as Reed noted, Al Gore proposed during the campaign three years ago some $500 billion in tax cuts this decade, all focused on middle-income and working poor Americans, virtually all of which are now law. In recent weeks From and Reed have focused on Gephardt's bold proposal to achieve universal health insurance by subsidizing employer insurance costs and financ ing the $200 billion-plus annual cost with the complete repeal of the tax cuts. Politically, their argument is that this is tax and spend, pure and simple. More important, however, they also argue that Gephardt would knowingly saddle the economy with deficits every bit as high as Bush's program will. Gephardt counters that cutting the business cost of insurance will actually stimulate economic growth and thus eventually whittle down the deficit. This is the mirror image of the Bush argument that cutting income taxes will have the same effect. No one disputes the inevitability of deficits in the short run, but the long-range implications if the deficits don't respond (for Social Security as well as the economy) are huge. This is a debate worth having. For the benefit of the rest of us, it would be nice if the debate focused on the real issue instead of the familiar epithets the Democratic Party's factions have been hurling at each other for years. Follow-up: In a column last month, I noted that Representative Dick Gephardt was the only Democratic presidential candidate supporting legislation that would attack two of the pillars of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling that established abortion rights, in the guise of prohibiting at least one procedure used during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. Last week, the legislation that President Bush will soon sign came to a vote on the House floor, and Gephardt chose to be absent. I'm told Gephardt has not changed his position on the issue. His absence will not spare him from having to explain how he can be prochoice as well as in favor of junking Roe's absolute requirement that a woman's health not be endangered at any time and that abortions cannot be outlawed prior to fetal viability. boston.com