BusinessWeek slams Bush's voodoo economics

[aeon flux]

Permanent Tax Cuts Are the Last Thing We Need

With deficits extending until who-knows-when, only the narrowest of interests will be served by carving the tax cuts into stone

...The CBO, using fairly optimistic gross domestic product growth projections of about 3.2% annually, projects that extending the tax cut for a second 10 years would cost not the $1.35 trillion of its first decade but $4 trillion--an average of $400 billion a year. This would create a permanent structural deficit, like the one of the 1980s, only worse. Didn't we learn this lesson once?

To camouflage the real impact, conservative think tanks are now trotting out the old, discredited idea that tax cuts so stimulate growth that we should pad projections of future revenues. This cooking of the books is termed "dynamic scoring." Sorry, but that conceit died in the 1980s. Indeed, it was in the 1990s that growth took off after two widely deplored upper-bracket tax hikes.

Mercifully, dynamic scoring is failing to score with such honest fiscal conservatives as Dan L. Crippen, the Republican staff director of the CBO, or Lindy Paull, the Republican chief of staff of the Joint Tax Committee...

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