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GOP saying what it doesn't mean

When I've used strong phrases here like "Bush administration lies," some readers have rightfully called me on it, wanting some kind of, you know, proof. So let's start here. Daily Kos substitute contributor Billmon, is a series of direct quotes from top Bush administration officials, starting in August 2002 and going through May 2003, all on the topic of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This is what I mean by lies. From August through March, all top administration officials insisted that:
  1. Iraq had large, specific, deadly stores of chemical and biological weapons
  2. Iraqi troops had those weapons in hand and would use them against US troops
  3. finding them was a "top objective" of the military action, and
  4. all of this would be clearly proven with abundant evidence after US troops were in control of the country.
That was two months ago, and as you may have noticed, there have been absolutely no finds of weapons of mass destruction of any kind. So, in response, the same people have now said that they never expected to find large stashes of WMD, and that such was not the main point of the war anyway. As today's issue of Today's Papers points out, the latest finds of "mobile biological weapons labs" depend on your willingness to rule out every other possible use for the vehicles. And, as today's Daily Howler points out, George W. Bush promised in 2000 that the US could afford a tax cut of $1.3 trillion (over ten years), but no more, and since then has pushed for a tax cut that large, plus another one of $726 billion, and his administration gleefully admits there will be more tax cuts coming each year. The President just signed a bill raising the US debt ceiling by $984 billion, a US record for a single raise in the borrowing limit. Remember, this is the same George W. Bush who said it was best for the economy to give that $1.3 trillion surplus back as tax cuts, because we could all afford it and still have plenty of money to fulfill Social Security obligations and to handle any disaster that might come along. We now know that not to be true, as in just over two years Bush has taken the US from record surpluses to record deficits, and the roughly US$200 billion or so they've spent on homeland security (far too little) and the war in Iraq does not account for the majority of the deficit. The administration's own economists say we're now in for big deficits for at least the next ten years. So the Bush administration's former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, commissioned a report to determine the long-term effect of these deficits, clearly expecting to report them as "no big deal." It didn't turn out that way, you'll be shocked to learn. In fact, under Bush's policies, the US is facing a "chronic" debt of at least $44 trillion, ten times the current US national debt and equivalent to 94% of all US household assets.
The study asserts that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or a painful mix of both are unavoidable if the US is to meet benefit promises to future generations. It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66% across-the-board income tax increase.
(Note for the skeptical: the reporter here is Peronet Despeignes, a former Detroit News technology columnist who printed some absolutely false and unsupportable things about Mac OS 9 when it was first released, stuff we covered in MWJ 2000.01.10 if you're an MWJ reader. Here, however, he's writing about a report that everyone seems to agree exists and says what he thinks it says.) Oddly enough, this report appeared in London's Financial Times, not in any US newspaper. That's because the administration, having enough trouble pushing through a mammoth second tax cut that's valued at $350 billion only because most of the cuts are supposed to "expire" in ten years (and the GOP is counting on Congress's fecklessness to prevent that from happening), decided to leave this information out of both the budget and the tax cut debate. Bush continues to say that both of the tax cuts are about "creating jobs" when his administration's tenure has seen more job losses than any since that of Herbert Hoover. Even if you believe it will create jobs, even the administration's rosy estimates of how many jobs the new tax cut will create falls short of how many jobs his administration has already destroyed (hey, he can't get credit for "creating" if he doesn't get credit for "destroying", too). As Daniel Gross points out, the economy on average creates 2,000,000 jobs every 18 months, and the Bush administration says the tax cut will create 1,400,000 jobs over the same period. You can read this one of two ways. If you read it as 1,400,000 new jobs instead of 2,000,000, then Bush has gotten Congress to agree to pay $350 billion over ten years to promote 70% of average job growth. If you read it as 1,400,000 jobs over what the economy would generate on average (even if that current average is higher or lower than 2,000,000 jobs in 18 months), then Bush has just gotten the US citizenry to pay $250,000 for each new job, and even that will mean a net loss of jobs in his first four years. Evidence like the Treasury report that this is bankrupting the US gets left out of the debate, because it would pretty plainly show that the assertions about how the US can "afford" all this, from 2000 onward, are demonstrably false. Again, the true debate is one the hard right is unwilling to have because it knows it will lose. The administration is now admitting that "weapons of mass destruction" was really just "the reason everyone could agree on" to go to war, a pretty plain admission that the war was decided on long before it was justified. For tax cuts, the hidden motive is to starve the government of revenue in the hopes of gutting the social programs that the vast majority of Americans want. If tax cuts slash the government's income by 50% or so, Congress will have to get rid of programs that the GOP hates, like education and health care for people who are obviously too inferior to afford their own. These are cuts the right could never get through on their merits, so they're trying to force them through the back door. Some prominent GOP apologists are denying this, but it's been neocon thinking for at least 20 years, promoted by no less than Irving Kristol, father of today's neoconservative movement (and actual father of Bill Kristol, former Dan Quayle assistant, current Fox News spewbag, and editor of conservative bible The Weekly Standard). Read this Los Angeles Times article by neocon Bruce Bartlett while it's available:
When California's Proposition 13 came along in 1978, Kristol saw another way in which tax cutting was useful. By denying government its fuel, tax cuts forced politicians to cut spending. In this sense, supply-side economics echoed the thinking of conservative economist Milton Friedman, who wrote in a 1978 column that "the only effective way to restrain government spending is by limiting government's explicit tax revenue ? just as a limited income is the only effective restraint on any individual's or family's spending." Kristol became an evangelist for supply-side economics, writing innumerable Wall Street Journal columns on the topic and publishing supply-siders like Wanniski and Paul Craig Roberts in his own journal, the Public Interest. His writings were paramount in convincing mainstream conservative economists like Herb Stein and Alan Greenspan to give supply-side economics a chance, despite their misgivings about cutting taxes without cutting spending at the same time. They, in turn, made it possible for Reagan to run on a supply-side platform in 1980 without being forced to explain how he would cut spending to pay for his tax cut. [...]Starving the beast and increasing incentives for work, saving and investment are still good reasons to cut taxes today. They have a sound theoretical underpinning, unlike some White House arguments ? like the one that eliminating taxes on dividends will create jobs. There are good reasons to eliminate taxes on dividends, but creating jobs is not one of them.
I wanted to conclude with some recent Congressional testimony by a supply-sider who wants to reduce government revenue but believes what's going on now is wrong because it's "dishonest" and likely not to stick when people figure out what's going on. Unfortunately, I only read it in one paragraph of a magazine I can't find now, and this act of conservative honesty is so out of the mainstream that I can't find a single news report about it. That's apparently what happens if we try to have an honest debate about the real reasons for big administration actions: it gets buried. This is what Bush calls "restoring integrity to the White House."

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