WP: Show U.S. the Money (revisiting tax cuts)

[kskiska]

There Are 87 Billion Reasons to Revisit Those Tax Cuts, Mr. President

Imagine an army massing directly in front of you. Your own forces are having some supply line problems. And enemies are hiding on either side, waiting to ambush you. So what do you do? Dismantle your own arsenal?

If you're talking about the fiscal battles the United States is facing, and if you're the Bush administration, the answer seems to be: Yes. Call it fiscal disarmament. In its first two years, the Bush administration -- faced with a swelling army of retirees, unknown costs of lurking national security dangers and challenges to its supply of tax revenues because of fixes needed with the alternate minimum tax -- chose to surrender some of the fiscal weapons at its disposal through massive tax cuts.

The president's request last week for another $87 billion for the occupation in Iraq is chump change in the context of what has been given away in the Bush tax cuts. It comes to about 5 percent of the cost of the president's tax cuts over 10 years. In the mountain of U.S. borrowing, it amounts to a hill of beans. It will add only a little more than 2 percent to the national debt.

Yet the request, which could push the federal budget deficit to more than $500 billion during the next fiscal year, should make people stop and wonder whether President Bush's 2001 and 2002 tax cuts significantly compromised America's ability to respond vigorously to problems at home and abroad in the future. Bush's two swift and deep cuts changed the tenor of American politics, probably for the next decade. Instead of debating about whether or how to shore up Social Security, invest in our cities, expand prescription drug coverage and back up our military might abroad with reconstruction and aid packages, we will lapse back into the politics of relative scarcity, dominated by haggling over cuts in government spending and a game of chicken over who proposes tax increases.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3660-2003Sep12.html