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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (297084)	7/27/2006 7:28:47 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1583868

no ID is required so why not?

To: combjelly who wrote (297084)	7/27/2006 8:17:40 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583868

Bush's 2003 Tax Cuts: Wildly Successful by Mike Franc Posted Jul 14, 2006 Supply-side economists should be smiling these days. After all, the Congressional Budget Office recently confirmed that President Bush’s 2003 tax-cut package has been wildly successful. Federal revenues rose $206 billion (13%) during the first nine months of this fiscal year. This follows last year’s record surge in revenues, when Uncle Sam’s coffers grew by $274 billion (15%). Not surprisingly, the White House lowered its projection of the current year’s budget deficit by more than $100 billion. But free market economists such as my colleague Dan Mitchell were unfazed. "The supply-side tax cuts of 2003,” he told the Washington Post, “are working exactly as we would have expected. Lower taxes on work, saving and investment leads to more work, saving and investment. It's not exactly rocket science." The fruits of this additional work, savings and investment are evident. In the two years preceding the cuts, economic growth averaged a paltry 1 percent and too many job-seeking Americans (6 percent) were unemployed. Since then, we have experienced three years of solid 4% growth, 5.4 million new jobs have been created, and the unemployment rate hasn’t budged from its historic low of 4.6%. This growing economy may prove to be Bush’s most impressive domestic policy achievement. But The New York Times didn’t know what to make of all this. It breathlessly described how this “unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy … is surprising even seasoned budget analysts.” The confusion can be traced back to the official revenue scorekeepers on Capitol Hill, the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation -- and their failure to predict the consequences of changes in tax law. Back in 2003, Senate moderates such as Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) pressured Bush to limit the overall “cost” of the tax package to $350 billion over 10 years. Working within this artificial constraint, and bound by CBO’s and JCT’s static revenue forecasts, the final bill managed to reduce the top marginal rates on income, capitol gains and dividends, but did so within a confusing matrix of start dates, phase outs and other technicalities. Even Voinovich appeared to regret the shortcomings of his self-imposed straight-jacket, musing that he would have liked “to see larger tax relief for small businesses and working families” but only “if we can offset the additional cost.” Sure enough, CBO informed lawmakers in May 2003 that the tax cuts would cost the treasury $94 billion in 2006. But it now appears that the cuts generated so much “unexpected” economic activity that the original CBO projection for 2006 was off by an astounding $124 billion! Add in last year’s underestimation of $89 billion, and the $25 billion oversight in 2004, and you have a cumulative CBO mistake that now totals $238 billion. In addition to swinging and missing on the bill’s revenue effects, the Joint Committee on Taxation also struck out on its economic benefits. The legislation, it predicted, would generate only minor and short-lived gains which would be “outweighed by the reduction in national savings due to increasing federal government deficits.” One wonders whether congressional liberals who rejected these cuts in 2003 will acknowledge their own underestimation of the power of pro-growth tax relief. “This tax bill,” ultra-liberal Mark Dayton (D.-Minn.) fretted back then, “is one of the most dangerous, destructive and dishonorable acts of government that I have ever seen.” Kent Conrad (D.-N.D.), called it “a policy of debt, deficits and decline” that “will weaken America, not strengthen it.” Ted Kennedy (D.-Mass.) ridiculed the “ideologically rigid” economic theory underlying the cuts. “Republicans,” he sneered, “think that if you give tax breaks to the wealthiest taxpayers, they will invest more and the economy will grow. It is called ‘trickle-down’ economics.” It is destined to fail, he insisted, because “the wealthy may not use the money in ways that create jobs and expand production.” Three years later, some tough questions are in order. Had hand-wringing moderates known then what they know now about the gusher of revenues that Bush’s cuts would usher in, would they have supported a more robust package of pro-growth reforms? Will liberals like Ted Kennedy ever concede that Reaganesque tax policies lift the economy without creating huge fiscal holes? And will lawmakers ever, ever, oust the economists at the Joint Committee on Taxation whose flawed revenue estimates limit our ability to implement the truly pro-growth tax policy we deserve? humanevents.com

To: combjelly who wrote (297084)	7/27/2006 9:28:55 PM
From: SilentZ	Respond to of 1583868

CJ, just for you: jasonbrzoska.com -Z

To: combjelly who wrote (297084)	7/28/2006 7:41:46 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583868

Krugman right on... Reign of Error By PAUL KRUGMAN Amid everything else that’s going wrong in the world, here’s one more piece of depressing news: a few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda. At one level, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don’t like have been established, whether it’s the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole. But it’s dismaying to realize that the machine remains so effective. Here’s how the process works. First, if the facts fail to support the administration position on an issue — stem cells, global warming, tax cuts, income inequality, Iraq — officials refuse to acknowledge the facts. Sometimes the officials simply lie. “The tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income inequality,” Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, declared a couple of months ago. More often, however, they bob and weave. Consider, for example, Condoleezza Rice’s response a few months ago, when pressed to explain why the administration always links the Iraq war to 9/11. She admitted that Saddam, “as far as we know, did not order Sept. 11, may not have even known of Sept. 11.” (Notice how her statement, while literally true, nonetheless seems to imply both that it’s still possible that Saddam ordered 9/11, and that he probably did know about it.) “But,” she went on, “that’s a very narrow definition of what caused Sept. 11.” Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It’s hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag. Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980’s-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.) Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina. And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren’t de facto branches of the Republican National Committee? The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it’s not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the “good news” from Iraq — and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration’s favor. Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them. It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?