President Bush traveled to New Jersey to promote his tax-cut proposal
Plain language. What Bush doesn't say anymore is that the sputtering economy and his tax cut have almost nothing to do with each other. Even if the cut is retroactive, only a tiny percentage — maybe $6 billion of the $1.6 trillion in tax relief — will find its way into American pockets this year.
And this, of course, happens to be the year that the economy figures to do the bulk of its sputtering. Bush, who rightly says he has "great faith in the economy" over the long haul, backloads the bulk of the benefits in the second five years of the plan — too late to blunt even an extended slowdown, and if he's making some Keynesian argument about cutting taxes in far-off times of plenty, he's not articulating it very well.
By leaving himself open to that valid half of the Democratic argument ("Now there are real facts out there and the economic plan to me is not meeting the needs that are out there," Dick Gephardt declared Tuesday), he's giving unnecessary weight to the other half — that Bush is causing this "sputtering" himself.
"Part of this, I guess, was started when Dick Cheney a few months back said we were in a recession," Gephardt said. "We've been talking ourselves into this; now it is happening."
Bizarre meets bizarre
Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey called that charge "faintly bizarre," and he's right — not only did this slowdown take root last fall, but Bush has done little more than tell it like it is, and understate it at that. But it's just as bizarre a contention that Bush's plan, conceived under much sunnier economic skies, can do anything about consumer spending this year or next. And having apparently made the political decision that his tax relief isn't saleable on purely moral grounds, Bush might want to reconsider matching his message to his medicine.
Which is not to say an income tax cut can do anything to temper a slowdown as business-related as this one is. But he could look awfully presidential trying — and that's where the right-wing tax-cut-thumpers like Dick Armey, Tom DeLay and their newest stalking horse, conservative Pennsylvania congressman Pat Toomey, come in.
"American taxpayers deserve a bigger, faster, pro-growth tax cut," Toomey declared Wednesday as he introduced a 10-year, $2.2 trillion tax cut that "accelerates and expands the President's proposal" with a faster timetable and additional tax repeals.
The Armey crowd isn't about economic stimulus — they just like tax cuts — and a $2.2 trillion cut has no future in the Senate, aside from possibly making Bush's $1.6 trillion plan look small (and that would be fine with the White House). But there's another message for Bush in the Armey-DeLay plan: Start construction now on a brand-new tax cut, one that works hard, works fast, and gives everybody plenty of political cover.
Turn the tax cut into a crisis response. Take the smartest things about Toomey's $2.2 trillion monster — namely, its speed — and blend it with the best of the Democratic objections over fiscal sanity. Let the Senate moderates have their written-in "trigger," or "mid-course correction," however they want to name it (Bush ought to know there'll be one of those in November 2004 anyway) and back-load the debt repayment instead of the tax cuts.
In fact, this is probably how Bush should have sold his CO2 flip-flop — as a crisis-induced, temporary delay until the skies clear a little (no pun intended) — and it's how a big tax cut can make everybody, from Armey to Bush to Gephardt, look like they're actually reading the financial pages instead of just skimming over the headlines and moving on with their own ideological agenda.
Heck, he might even get Congress to tighten its belt to 4 percent spending increases for a year or two, merely as a belt-tightening gesture that would match the rest of the country's.