October 2003 Archives

A famous adage suggests that the first step one needs to take to get out of a hole is to stop digging.

Republicans, however, have their shovels out. Again.

As Matt Miller explains in his latest column:

The deficit next year may top $500 billion. There are $25 trillion in unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and other federal retirement programs. So what do Republicans in Washington offer up as their next big domestic idea? More tax cuts, of course! This time to the tune of $140 billion in corporate tax reductions over the next decade.

How mad has our government's fiscal policy under Republican leadership become? Miller quickly outlines the facts:

From 1970 to 2000 federal spending averaged 20.9 percent of GDP.

To pay for this spending, which both political parties had voted for over the decades, President Bush inherited a federal government that took in about 20 percent of GDP in revenues. In fiscal year 2003, which just ended, revenues dropped to 16.6 percent of GDP.

This 16.6 percent - mostly the result of Bush's three rounds of tax cuts - is the lowest federal revenue has been since 1959, near the end of the Eisenhower administration. This was before Medicare and Medicaid existed, not to mention most federal aid for education, student loans, modern levels of Social Security and much more.

In addition, within that revenue total, income taxes, the progressive part of our tax code, sank as a share of GDP to their lowest level since 1941. The payroll tax, which takes its heaviest bite from lower-income workers, rose to its biggest share of federal revenue ever.

One, moreover, that was accomplished without popular mandate and without candor on the part of the policymakers who made it happen.

Not that his remaking of our government should come as a surprise. The radical conservative think tankers have outlined their hopes to change our government in numerous articles over the years.

What's the result? I agree with Miller, who writes:

The bottom line - and these are facts, not liberal rhetoric - is that Bush's tax cuts have sent debt soaring and shifted the burden of government to lower-income Americans, all to fund tax cuts mostly for the best-off. These tax cuts have also made a nice start on the "de-funding" of government for which radical conservatives have longed.

Elections do matter. There are differences between the parties. People need to realize this fact before it is too late to climb out of the intergenerational debt hole the Republicans are digging.

Speaking of the disconnect between the Bush Administration's rhetoric and reality, the Center for American Progress has created this illuminating chart highlighting the difference between the White House's claims and the reality of how it is treating our troops during this war.

Yes, there may be a tendency to focus on the misrepresentation (lie) President Bush's uttered during his press conference about how the "Mission Accomplished" sign ended up on the USS Abraham Lincoln for his Top Gun photo-op earlier this year.

President Bush's effort to pass the blame for the sign onto the military was a classless act. Anyone who has worked on the planning for a presidential appearance knows that there is simply no way the White House staff would have not had approval over the sign's placement.

And, remember, earlier this year the White House was happy to take credit for their media and event savvy. As the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a couple weeks after the carrier photo-op:

The most elaborate — and criticized — White House event so far was Bush’s speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that Sforza embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Bush landed in a flight suit and made his early-evening speech.

Media strategists noted afterward that Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated colors over Bush’s right shoulder and the ‘‘Mission Accomplished’’ banner placed to capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image-makers call ‘‘magic-hour light,’’ which cast a golden glow on Bush.

A bipartisan group of Senators urged the Bush Administration to stop stonewalling the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and turn over the documents it needs to make a proper investigation of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

This is not suprising. While feigning support for this effort, the Bush Administration has impeded this needed investigation at every turn.

If the White House is delaying in an attempt to run out the clock, I hope Senators Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) make good on their pledge to extend the Commission's life so that it can get the job done despite these delaying tactics.

The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports this morning:

Powerful suicide car bombs exploded outside the local headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and three police stations across Baghdad Monday morning, killing at least 34 people and wounding 224 in a series of sophisticated and apparently coordinated attacks on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

That is interesting spin.

Sara Kehaulani Goo reports on the latest airline security follies:

Jon Sheldon's 2-year-old son got a taste of airport security this summer. When he reached the checkpoint at Reagan National Airport with his father, he was surrounded by diligent screeners focused on a potential security threat: his plastic "sippy"cup. A standoff ensued -- the boy refusing to surrender the cup and the screeners unwilling to yield on a possible risk to the flying public.

Meanwhile, Sheldon loaded his carry-on bag onto the X-ray machine conveyor belt. The bag passed through without a blink from anyone, and it was only later that Sheldon realized that he had accidentally stuffed into his bag a Leatherman pocketknife with a three-inch blade.

In the case of the cup, the TSA said it had good reason to demand compliance from the 2-year-old. "While it might seem strange we would be focused on a sippy cup, we have reasons to believe there are certain things introduced in sippy cups that are not as obvious as a Leatherman," Stover said.

No one asked about them at any of the security checkpoints through which we passed.

So, are they a threat or not? Or is this just a pathetic case of CYA from an agency that continues to be denied the funding it needs to really protect the public.

Tax cuts for the affluent or airline security. What's your priority?

The Los Angeles Times' Nancy Vogel and Gregg Jones report:

Hundreds of times in the five-year reign of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, Ray Haynes has stood on the Assembly floor and spoken like the true conservative he is.

Assemblyman Haynes has beseeched Democrats who dominate the Legislature to cut spending and free business from government's tentacles. More than 95% of the time, Haynes says, Democrats did the opposite.

But as Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger prepares to be sworn in next month as California's governor, Haynes (R-Murietta) is practically giddy, predicting the dynamics of the Legislature are about to change.

At last, he and others say, the Legislature will be forced to move beyond the partisan bickering, ideological deadlocks and Democratic arrogance that have so often stymied or silenced the minority party and led to damaging delays in passing budgets.

Of course. How convenient.

U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has fashioned a major constitutional crisis with his fight to pass another round of Congressional redistricting in his home state. The Washington Post's Edward Walsh reports:

By enacting a new congressional redistricting plan this month that replaced a court-ordered plan used in the 2002 elections, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature did more than demonstrate a willingness to play political hardball against its Democratic opponents. It waded into uncharted legal and constitutional territory, raising a question to which there is no clear answer.

If the courts do not strike down this dubious Texas action, then one should worry that all redistricting restraint will end. Only about 12 states have provisions explicitly outlawing numerous reapportionments.

The other states could leave themselves open for a free-for-all every time political power changes:

"If this is sustained, what we will have is a form of arms race where there is no restraint on keeping the game going on throughout a decade," [The Brookings Institution's Thomas] Mann said. "You ask, who wins in this process? This is a process designed not for citizens or voters but for politicians. It will lead politicians to say there are no limits. I think it threatens the legitimacy of democracy."

The question now is whether our entire political system follows him into it.

Some on the right are trying to recast history with arguments that President Bush and his advisors did not argue that Iraq posed an imminent threat with nuclear weapons to justify our invasion on the timetable upon which the White House insisted.

Remember what President Bush told a Cincinnati audience on October 7, 2002:

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Nothing at all.

Of course, perhaps I cannot blame conservatives for trying to rewrite their arguments in the wake of the evidence coming out showing how wrong they were. The Washington Post's Barton Gellman reports:

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either. (emphasis added)

The United States Senate yesterday added $1 billion to President Bush's request for funds to improve our national voting system. You may remember that many political leaders promised such improvements the wake of the 2000 Florida vote debacle.

Even Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) remembers those promises, as the Associated Press' Jim Abrams reports:

"The cold reality is this," McConnell said. "We promised the American people that in the fall of 2004 we would have the mechanisms in place to dramatically improve the election system."

But some Republican leaders have decided that tax cuts for the affluent are more important than voting improvements. They did not, after all, complain about busting the budget when they approved President Bush's irresponsible tax cuts.

Now that money is needed to fund this important promise, we are suddenly subjected to lectures about budget busting from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles (R-Okla.).

If Republicans really cared about budget deficits, they would repeal the tax cuts given to the affluent. They would close corporate tax loopholes.

Do not hold your breath. Balancing the budget is not the real agenda here.

Joshua Micah Marshall over at Talking Points Memo is running a contest to remind us about how the Bush Administration argued before the war that Iraq and Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat -- even if those last two words were rarely used. Marshall writes:

Our wingerly friends have made a lot of the rarity of occurences in which the phrase ‘imminent threat’ was used. But they rather ignore all the instances in which administration officials told the public we had to depose Saddam right now before he could use his nuclear weapons and smallpox on us. Any quotation which conveys the imminent threat message is acceptable even it doesn't contain the phrase 'imminent threat.'

(One example, though certainly not the best one, might be President Bush’s statement on March 7th of this year that he would no longer “leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons.”)

So now it’s up to you. Send us your best Bush administration ‘imminent threat’ quote.

Over two years after the war on terrorism supposedly began, our government finally may be getting around to improving seaport security.

Of course, those improvements will be expensive. The Baltimore Sun's Meredith Cohn reports:

Although the Coast Guard has estimated that the security improvements will cost $7.3 billion, only about $400 million has been allocated from federal sources. That compares with about $3 billion that has been provided for the nation's airports. Just how much more federal help the ports will receive has not been determined.

Remember the Bush Administration's priorities. Not seaport security. Or funding a number of other national and homeland security initiatives.

No, we have to have tax cuts first. Really.

Here we go again. Congressional Republicans continue to push their irresponsible tax cut policy in the face of record deficits. The New York Times' Edmund L. Andrews reports:

House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal policy research group, said preliminary tax data for this year indicated that corporate taxes accounted for just 7.4 percent of total tax receipts, down from about 21 percent of total receipts in the 1960's.

The Republicans' answer is apparently "yes."

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has issued a new analysis about the impact of the ongoing state budget crises. Elizabeth C. McNichol and Jennifer Schiess write:

States faced gaps of more than $150 billion in their combined fiscal year 2003 and 2004 budgets. Since all states but one are required by constitution or law to balance their budgets, they have taken a variety of actions to close these gaps. In the process, states have cut spending dramatically. The continuing state fiscal crisis is causing state government to shrink and is putting important state services at risk.

This decline in spending is particularly problematic in the current economic climate. Many state programs are designed to be counter-cyclical: their costs rise during economic downturns as they assist families that have lost jobs or income.

States also are facing higher costs at this time for fulfilling federal policies and mandates, such as costs for homeland security and for implementing the No Child Left Behind policies. Most states have not been able to come up with enough resources to maintain existing programs at pre-recession levels, much less to meet their expanded responsibilities.

On top of all of this, state tax revenues have fallen below the 30-year average. Part of this is caused by the economic downturn, which lowers sales and income tax revenue. But a significant part of this revenue crisis comes from the tax cuts passed during the economic boom of the late 1990s.

Now, of course, it is largely impossible to reverse those tax cuts. This, along with our transition to a service economy, has sharply reduced the tax base from which state governments can draw the revenues needed to fund these important programs and meet unfunded federal mandates.

This is a crisis that requires something more than "no new taxes" or "even more (irresponsible) tax cuts" rhetoric. I do not, however, expect to see much change on the part of those ideologically inclined to starve government regardless of the consequences.

This news from Political Money Line may surprise you:

From the start of the campaigns through September 30, 2003, the nine top Democratic Presidential candidates equaled and slightly exceeded President Bush’s primary fundraising receipts from itemized individual donors.

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) expresses some buyer's remorse:

"When the security of this nation is threatened, Congress and the American people give the president great latitude," he said. "We probably have given this president more flexibility, more latitude, more range, unquestioned, than any president since Franklin Roosevelt -- probably too much. The Congress, in my opinion, really abrogated much of its responsibility."

Matt Miller rightly rips into our Democratic members of Congress for failing to force a substantive debate over the Bush Administration's credit card financing of the Iraq mission:

Critics are mad at Democrats, to be sure, but ultimately for the wrong reasons. Some complain that in voting against the package, House Democrats and some presidential contenders proved the party is unfit to manage national security.

Others instead lament Bush’s high-handedness. How dare Bush tell Democrats that he was not interested in negotiating on the $87 billion, that "this is the way it has to be." What can you do, Democrats whine, when a president says it’s my way or the highway?

For many Democrats, the apparent answer is: "You cave and give the president what he wants." The better answer, which Democrats didn’t have the guts to pursue aggressively, was to filibuster over the plan’s financing, and use the showdown to sear into the public mind the perverse priorities of the Bush White House at a time of supposed war and "sacrifice."

That would have, at least, provided an opportunity to point out that we are immorally passing along to our children and future generations heavy amounts of debt simply to allow the richest among our society to enjoy larger tax breaks.

That is a quite inexcusable choice. Miller continues:

But Democrats could have united behind a message that said, "of course we support the troops -- it’s how we pay for this that matters, and I’m sorry, Mr. President, but your plan to make our kids pay for Iraq because you want to keep trillions in tax cuts mostly for the wealthiest is just plain wrong."

The $87 billion request offered what educators call a "teachable moment." The public was stunned by the sums involved, and Democrats could have called a national timeout and broken through.

But Miller is correct in noting that someone -- anyone -- in a leadership position should have at least tried.

While I was away, the new Center for American Progress started adding interesting materials to its web site.

The Center for American Progress is a new liberal Washington, D.C., think tank. Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta is the Chief Executive Officer and one of the driving forces behind this excellent new effort.

What is this new organization about? As the web site explains:

The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all Americans. We believe that Americans are bound together by a common commitment to these values and we aspire to ensure that our national policies reflect these values. Our policy and communications efforts are organized around four major objectives:

• developing a long term vision of a progressive America,
• providing a forum to generate new progressive ideas and policy proposals,
• responding effectively and rapidly to conservative proposals and rhetoric with a thoughtful critique and clear alternatives, and
• communicating progressive messages to the American public.

The Center has rounded up an excellent roster of fellows, including several of my favorite policy writers.

I am quite happy the Center for American Progress is here. Its analysts will undoubtedly play a vital role in the policy debates to come. I have signed up for its daily policy e-mail updates, and urge you to do so as well.

Wonder how conservatives might react to a hypothetical story that a certain recent former Democratic president had admitted an addiction to prescription drugs?

Well, a friend sent me a link to this column written by St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan who attempts to enter this bizzaro world.

I wish liberals were much less celebratory about Rush Limbaugh's problems. But I do not have much problem with pointing out the obvious hypocrisy involved in the subject.

Yes, I am disappointed that California voters decided to approve the recall against Governor Gray Davis (D). Beating the recall locally provides little solice.

I am now concerned, however, that Democratic Party leaders are going to have a dangerous reaction to the election. Now is not the time to start another recall. Nor is it the time to obstruct simply to be obstructionist.

California voters decided that they wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) in the governor's office. While Democrats need not agree with that decision, they should respect it.

I would rather not hear any more talk about new recall efforts or boycotting Schwarzenegger's first State of the State speech or resignations in retaliation for the voters' decision.

Democrats may have to oppose Schwarzenegger. But they should wait until the Governor-elect gives them reasons based in policy and principle to do so.

The deteriorating relations between Taiwan and China bear close watching in the coming months.

The Washington Post's John Pomfret reports:

President Chen Shui-bian issued one of his strongest condemnations of China on Monday and ruled out any talks as long as China imposes conditions on Taiwan. In an interview in the presidential palace in central Taipei, the 52-year-old lawyer, who in March 2000 became the first opposition candidate to be elected president, accused China of "hostile intent" toward Taiwan. Chen, who faces a tight race next year, declared that Taiwan would "walk our own road, our own Taiwan road."

I've just returned from voting in today's California special election. There was a line, and there is never a line when I've voted here.

I've been away from this state the past five days, and seeing the recall from an eastern time zone did not reduce my sense of dread over what could happen today.

I voted No No No. No on the recall. No on Proposition 53, the spectacularly ill-advised ballot-box budgeting measure. No on Proposition 54.

The bad cold I acquired in Connecticut is just icing.

At least my Cubbies play tonight -- a wonderful event that will serve as an useful distraction. But don't worry, it could be some time before we know for sure the results from today's balloting.