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So what's his latest plan? To cut taxes again. Oh, that's good. Ever since Reagan, the Republican Party has been trying to cast itself as the party of fiscal responsibility. Reagan could pull that off because when he was still healthy Reagan could have sold sand to Gila Monsters, so no-one bothered asking questions like why it was that he was running among the largest peace-time deficits in recent history. He was still fiscally responsible because he was a Republican. He told us so. We exchanged "tax and spend" Democrats for "borrow and spend" Republicans. Myself, I prefer a balanced budget even if it involves higher taxes. What we really need now is to roll back some of those stupid tax cuts that got passed last spring. They were simply too deep. I'd prefer to see the government continue paying down the debt. That, in fact, is even more fiscally stimulating than a tax cut, because it decreases the demand by the Government on the pool of loan money, leaving more available for investment in businesses. And in the long run it results in a virtuous circle of improvements in government finances as the cost of paying interest in the debt declines, leaving even more money in the budget for other things. How about let's have two pounds of butter next year instead of one pound now, please? (discussion in progress) Update 20010910: Here's an article from the Washington Post about how nonsensical Bush's tax cut really was. It's scary reading; to justify the cut they made all sorts of false-to-fact assumptions. |
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