TAX CUTS AS LONG TERM POLITICAL STRATEGY
Screwing the Poor, Making Love to the Rich

Back in January, I speculated that Bush's extremely huge, extremely irrational tax cuts were riffing on fascist economist Milton Friedman's theory about cutting social programs: cut the budget so sharply that the federal government simply cannot pay for a social safety net--conservative politicians should use politically popular tax cuts to lock in a third world approach to US society. More respectable writers than me have drawn the same conclusion.

Atlantic Monthly senior editor Jack Beatty writes:

By any definition, not acting now to narrow the gap between revenues and outlays is a dereliction of fiduciary responsibility. Cutting taxes in the face of it is willful recklessness. But this policy failure is a political success for the Rove/Bush strategy of keeping the sun from setting on the GOP era. Rove is open about the alchemy required. He laid it out for his Boswell, the invaluable Nicholas Lemann, of The New Yorker. Tax cuts and budget deficits will starve the government of funds for discretionary spending on things like after-school programs, health care, and public transportation. Receiving fewer services, Americans will demand tax relief. The idea is to create a permanent constituency for tax cuts, especially among poorer Americans, those "lucky duckies," in the words of a Wall Street Journal editorial, who pay little or no federal income taxes now. The Journal, the Administration's oracle on taxes, says the key to cutting government is to shift more of the tax burden on to the people at the lower end of the economic spectrum—those who work at Wal-Mart, who clean office buildings, staff nursing homes and school cafeterias. Since most state tax codes follow the federal template, the Bush cuts will trigger state income tax cuts, which will force more reductions in state spending and/or increases in state sales and local property taxes to balance state budgets. Sales and property taxes fall with painful severity on the less affluent. Piece by piece, under successive tax revolts, the regulatory responsibilities assumed by the federal government beginning a hundred years ago will be abandoned, and the programs of the Great Society (Medicare, Medicaid, Federal Aid to Education, Head Start, etc.) and the New Deal (Social Security) will be hollowed out, dismantled, or privatized.

Click here.

Thanks to Eschaton.

Over at ZNet, Noam Chomsky says pretty much the same while pondering Republican campaign strategy during an overall meditation on the American Empire and White House warmongering:

And that's true and what they want do is not just to stay in office but they would like to institutionalize the very regressive program put forward domestically, a program which will basically unravel whatever is left of New Deal social democratic systems and turn the country almost completely into a passive undemocratic society, controlled totally by high concentration of capitals. This means slashing public medical assistance, social security; probably schools; and increasing state power. These people are not conservatives, they brought the country into a federal deficit with the largest increase in federal spending in 20 years, that is since their last term in office- and huge tax cuts for the rich, and they want to institutionalize these programs. They are seeking a "fiscal train wreck" that will make it impossible to fund the programs. They know they cannot face an election declaring that they want to destroy very popular programs, but they can throw up their hands in despair and say, "What can we do, there's no money," after they have made sure there would be no money by huge tax cuts for the rich and sharp increase in spending for military (including high tech industry) and other programs beneficial to corporate power and the wealthy.

Click here.

It's time to end the anti-taxes dogma. Taxes are not bad; they are necessary. Taxes are not "punishment for the successful;" they are what keeps the country up and running. Conservatives have convinced the country that tax cuts equal good times: even though this is occasionally true, much of the time it is not. There are only three real questions to be asked about taxes. Who gets taxed? How much? Where does the tax money go? I think it's fairly obvious what the conservative answers to those questions are: tax cuts and payoffs for the rich, bleed the working and middle classes by cutting social programs and raising sales taxes (which almost never trouble the wealthy). It's one thing to stimulate the economy by providing tax relief to the middle class who will actually spend the money; it's quite another to fatten the bank accounts of already wealthy political campaign donors. "Trickle down" just doesn't work--wealthy investors don't have the same kind of economic punch as millions of rank and file consumers buying toothpaste and refrigerators do. It's one thing to be rooting out, say, Medicaid fraud; it's quite another to be trying to simply abolish Medicaid for ideological reasons. The free market fundamentalists want us to believe that the magical market will solve all our social woes, that the federal government always spends tax dollars unwisely. I suppose that HMOs are better than socialized medicine...

NOT!

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