Let's start it up with a story we can file under Y, for "Yet Another Bad Idea"
We forget that before George Bush’s foreign policy debacles, there were already several terrible ideas on the table regarding a whole host of domestic issues. The biggest of these bad ideas, in my opinion of course, was in regards to tax policy. Don’t be fooled into thinking the administration has run out of ways to screw working people by re-writing the tax code. From John Cassidy writing in The New Yorker:
To conservative Republicans who understand [Bush’s] coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people.
Work on achieving this ambitious program began with the tax cuts that Congress passed in 2001, 2002, and 2003, but the conservative economists who advise Bush and the right-wing institutes that support him have more in mind than consolidating their gains. Despite a gaping budget deficit, they are pressing the President to continue down a route that will reverse almost a century of American history. Since the personal income tax was introduced, in 1913, it has been based on two principles: the burden of taxation is distributed according to the ability to pay; and capital and labor carry their fair share. The Bush Administration appears set on undermining both of these principles.
Cassidy reminds the gentle reader that before anti-taxers grafted onto Bush, Steve Forbes was the darling of economic far-right. Flat-tax proposals and those like them have one purpose: to shift the tax burden away from the leisured “investor class” and onto workers, i.e. people who earn all or the bulk of their income through wages, not investments. The Bush tax-plan was hatched in 1999 as a counter to the Forbes flat-tax pitch. Heretofore, Paul Krugman has been the only mainstream writer to have highlighted this often-forgotten fact. Cassidy does an able job picking up the slack, and the net result has been the crucial alliance between Evangelicals and anti-taxers.
The entire piece is worth reading, though before you do, I’ll make one additional point not mentioned in the article. Probably the most important force driving the Iraq war wasn't oil, it was the fact that war presents Opportunitys For Distraction (OFDs). While we’re all busy getting misty-eyed over the sight of Old Glory and debating scurrilous proposals held together by false choices manufactured in Karl Rove's basement (We need to invade Iraq or send Saddam flowers and invite him to be a celebrity judge on American Idol, those are the only two options), administration henchmen are busy making their think-tank produced wet dreams a reality. Take Stephen Moore, Michael Moore’s fatter, rightwing lunatic cousin (not really) of the noxious Club For Growth.
“That’s the hidden story of what is going on under Bush,” Stephen Moore said. “People like me have been advocating a flat tax for a decade. I helped Dick Armey put together his flat-tax proposal. Nobody could get it done politically. What Bush has done, in a hidden way, is move us in baby steps toward the flat tax.”
Don’t like the idea on ending taxation on investment income? Look over there! The U.S. is bombing Baghdad and Fox New is showing footage while playing Beethoven (That really happened). It’s amazing how people like Stephen Moore are so cavalier that they can now brag about enormous, radical changes to the tax code that are done “in a hidden way.”
Also, what’s the deal with this?
In 2002, Ernest Christian, a Republican tax lawyer, circulated a plan to create a flat tax in what he termed “five easy pieces.”
Ernest Christian? Apparently, Charles Dickens is now writing tax policy. Given the current administration’s desire to drag us all back to the nineteenth century, the name is particularly fitting.
Posted by mike at September 3, 2004 07:24 PM