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

To: pompsander who wrote (746698)	7/31/2006 4:05:15 PM
From: pompsander	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

MSNBC.com 'The Putting of First Things First' The revival of the romance of the antiwar left is a potential disaster for the Democrats. It's what gave the world Richard Nixon in 1968. By Jonathan Alter Newsweek August 7, 2006 issue - To the consternation of my children, I once spent an afternoon with Monica Lewinsky. It was at a Thanksgiving Day party in 2000, while the results of the presidential campaign were still unclear, and the subject of our conversation was, of all things, Sen. Joe Lieberman. Lewinsky, who no doubt resented the senator's sanctimony in her own case, criticized him for staying on the ballot in his Senate race while running for vice president that year with Al Gore. "Why should he take the risk of losing his Senate seat?" I asked the former intern. Lewinsky batted her eyelashes and turned coy. "I thought politics was supposed to be all about taking risks," she replied, before adding with a laugh, "Oh, I guess I'm not supposed to say that." The woman who arguably gave the world George W. Bush didn't spend so much time in Bill Clinton's Oval Office because of her political smarts, but she had a point that is relevant to why Lieberman is facing such a strong challenge from Ned Lamont in next week's Connecticut primary. The fury directed at him by many Democrats is rooted not just in his support for Bush's Iraq fiasco but in his annoying habit of hedging his bets, as reflected in his risk-averse insistence that if he loses the primary, he'll run as an independent. His campaign poster when he ran for high-school class president featured him crouched on his parents' roof under the line: vote or i'll jump. The charm of that has worn off. But there's something psychologically deeper going on in this campaign that is both understandable and depressing—a cannibalistic distraction from what should be the top priority of Democrats, namely booting Republicans. The same Democrats who are justifiably angry with Lieberman for not holding Bush accountable are harming efforts to, well, hold Bush accountable. Lieberman's problems began long before he was kissed by President Bush at last year's State of the Union. With his Senate seat safe, he didn't have to fight in 2000. He went easier on Dick Cheney in their vice presidential debate than he did a few weeks back against fellow Democrat Lamont. During the Florida recount, he made a point of favoring military absentee ballots likely to be Republican. Lieberman has voted 90 percent of the time with the Democrats—but his first impulse is often to find fault with them. His 2004 run for the White House was better known for its attacks on fellow Democrats than on the incumbent. He approved of Washington intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. On Iraq, he buys the GOP argument that equates criticism of the commander in chief with hurting the troops, which means no real oversight. (Has he forgotten the Truman Committee during World War II?) The duty of the opposition is to oppose. At the same time, the Senate needs collegial moderates who work across party lines. It's the only way to stop the really bad stuff. And the revival of the romance of the antiwar left is a potential disaster for the Democrats. That's what gave the world Richard Nixon in 1968, when ideologically pure liberals who had backed Eugene McCarthy in the primaries refused to rally around Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey was "complicit" in the Vietnam War machine. Clinton managed to forge a pragmatic center for Democrats, which is why he didn't hesitate to campaign last week for Lieberman. Clinton's strong support may well pull the man who once called his behavior "disgraceful" over the finish line. It's also a warm-up for selling his pro-war wife to skeptical liberals. The bloggers who have noisily intervened deny they're interested in ideological purity. They point to their support in Senate races for pro-life candidates. But on Iraq, the liberal blogs brook no dissent. Not that it matters in Connecticut. If Lamont wins, only the laziest analysts can attribute it to the Netroots. Daily Kos is not exactly Topic A in the diners and union halls of the Nutmeg State. But if the blogs aren't a force on the ground, they are becoming a powerful factor in directing the passions (and pocketbooks) of far-flung Democratic activists. They're helping fuel a collective version of what shrinks call "projection," where the anger of Democrats at Bush is projected on a handy target, in this case Lieberman. But in doing so, they have neglected what FDR called "the putting of first things first." Job one for Democrats is identifying which Republican House incumbents are vulnerable in their own states and directing all available energy against them. Savaging fellow Democrats (except those who cannot win) should come after taking control, not before. The challenge facing voters this year is not to hold Democrats accountable for their heresies but Republicans accountable for where they have taken the country. They are the ones in power, not Joe Lieberman. URL: msnbc.msn.com © 2006 MSNBC.com

To: pompsander who wrote (746698)	8/1/2006 12:32:55 AM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

<<The remaining 14 percent were undecided.>> i.e., "Had already been born, and didn't care."...

To: pompsander who wrote (746698)	8/1/2006 3:07:52 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

the dismal science: The Last Laffer Bush's Treasury admits that tax cuts aren't free. By Jason Furman Posted Monday, July 31, 2006, at 1:16 PM ET Article URL: slate.com In Washington, as in fairy tales, be careful what you wish for. In a February speech, Vice President Cheney said, "It's time to re-examine our assumptions and to consider using more dynamic analysis to measure the true impact of tax cuts on the American economy." Calling for "dynamic analysis" or "dynamic scoring" can be supply-side code language for the view that tax cuts pay for much or all of themselves through stronger economic growth. Cheney proposed creating a new unit within Treasury to conduct this dynamic analysis and confidently predicted that it would find that tax cuts increase government revenues. Six months later, Treasury's first dynamic analysis of the president's policies is out. It belies the claim that the Bush proposal to make his tax cuts permanent will either pay for itself or galvanize the economy. There has long been a conflict between responsible conservative economists who make carefully hedged claims about the relatively modest economic effects of tax cuts and Laffer curve lovers, who think that tax cuts always spur enormous gains. And lately, emboldened by the large jump in tax revenues in 2005 and 2006 (and conveniently overlooking the nearly unprecedented three consecutive years of declining tax revenues that preceded it), Laffer disciples have widened their separation from mainstream economists into a chasm. On one side of the divide is the supply-sider in chief, who recently abandoned six years of somewhat more cautious statements on the subject to proclaim that tax cuts really do raise revenues: Some in Washington think the choice is between cutting taxes and cutting the deficit. This week's numbers show that this is a false choice. The economic growth fueled by tax relief has helped send tax revenues soaring. On the other side are the intellectually rigorous, professional economists who sit across the street from the White House at the Treasury Department, who were tasked with carrying out Cheney's "dynamic analysis" of President Bush's proposal to make the tax cuts permanent. "An important feature of this model is that a permanent reduction in taxes, as compared to baseline, would lead to an unsustainable accumulation of debt," they write. In place of a false choice of tax cuts magically paying for themselves and not costing anything, the Treasury offered a very real and painful one: The tax cuts need to be paid for by "either cutting future government spending or raising future taxes." And even if you take the path of cutting government programs—which is not the path the country is on today—Treasury found only minuscule economic effects from the tax cuts: a mere 0.7 percent increase in the size of the economy after many years. To put that number in perspective, averaged over 20 years, an increase in the economy of 0.7 percent is equivalent to a 0.04 percent increase in the average annual growth rate. So, instead of limping along at a mere 3 percent growth rate, the economy would charge ahead at a 3.04 percent growth rate. Notably missing from the Treasury report was the variable of greatest public interest: revenues. Although Treasury's model almost certainly estimated the degree to which the added growth helped pay for the tax cuts, officials there appear to have chosen not to report the number. But some simple arithmetic can fill in this gap: About one in every five dollars of national output is collected by the federal government in taxes. If that same ratio applies to the output added by the economic effects of the tax cuts, then the added revenues produced by the increased economic growth would be enough to offset less than one-tenth of the official "static" estimate of the tax cuts' cost. Furthermore, all these barely perceptible benefits rest on the assumption that starting in 2017, the tax cuts would be fully paid for with cuts of unprecedented depth in federal programs—totaling about a 50 percent reduction in all domestic spending other than entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. If such cuts were not made—and not even President Bush has proposed making them—then the resulting deficits, debt, and eventual tax increases would eliminate even these modest economic benefits. If we believe that spending cuts of this magnitude are unrealistic, then the Treasury economists have another important finding: The sooner we get rid of the tax cuts, the better it will be for the economy. Specifically, they found that national output would be 0.9 percent higher in the long run if we let them expire in 2010 rather than allowing them to continue along, forcing us to face even bigger tax increases in the future to make up for all of the added deficits and debt. The Treasury report probably won't change the minds of supply-siders, coming as it does on top of 25 years of similar findings by economists. But it should help convert Democrats into true believers in dynamic analysis. Jason Furman is a visiting scholar at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Administration. Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC