BUSH STIMULUS PLAN UNVEILED!….WELL, I’M STIMULATED, ANYWAY….So the Bushies ran their “stimulus” plan up the flagpole last week, presumably to gauge reaction and fine tune it before going public with the real thing. So what happened? They made it even worse. Here’s what they came up with:
Proposal
10-Year Cost
End dividend tax
$364 billion
Accelerate income tax cuts
$64 billion
Speed removal of marriage penalty
$58 billion
Speed up increase in child tax credit
$91 billion
Speed up move of low income taxpayers to 10% bracket
$48 billion
Adjustments in alternative minimum tax
$29 billion
Incentives for small business purchases
$16 billion
Special $3000 account for unemployed workers
$3.6 billion
Total
$674 billion
It’s amazing: every time I think I’m finally completely jaded, the Bush administration still manages to surprise me with its sheer mendacity and incompetence. Last week they were proposing $100 billion in state aid and extensions to unemployment, which got wide praise. So what did they do? They dumped it.
The dividend tax cut, on the other hand, was widely ridiculed. So what did they do? They expanded it. And added a bunch of other tax cuts into the package for good measure.
This plan is almost beyond comprehension. There is virtually nothing in it that will provide a short term stimulus, and even what’s there amounts to only $98 billion in the next 16 months. And on a long-term basis, the tax cuts are going to increase the federal deficit out to infinity and beyond, something that Republicans used to think was a bad thing.
Marginal tax rates are no longer at 70% and there’s no special reason to think that the United States is suffering from too much taxation at the moment. But the Republican party has become like some kind of mutant cyborg whose programming has become defective: the only words left in their vocabulary are “tax cuts” and they are simply going to keep repeating them over and over like a Hari Krishna chant regardless of whether they make any sense in current circumstances. It just boggles the mind.
As Paul Krugman put it, “Ideology aside, will these guys ever decide that their job includes solving problems, not just using them?”
