Posted on: Tuesday, May 20, 2003

EDITORIAL
This is a terrible time for new tax-cut bills

In Congress, House and Senate Republicans are trying to outdo each other in the amount of smoke and mirrors they can insert into their respective tax-cut legislation.

Senate Republicans are congratulating themselves that they managed to restrict their tax-cut bill to $350 billion — less than the $550 billion cut approved by the House and less than half the $726 billion that President Bush sought.

But the Senate figure is badly misleading. The number appears low because the bill suspends taxes on dividends only temporarily. They'd go back in place in 2007. That's dishonest. Supporters of these cuts have every intention of making them permanent. But pretending to make them last only three years makes the numbers look smaller for the moment.

Bush predicts the tax cuts he's asked for would stimulate 1.4 million jobs, which sounds good until you consider that 2 million jobs would be created without stimulus in a normal year.

These tax cuts are a bad idea. The first round has already succeeded in destroying one of the nation's most remarkable achievements of the 1990s — a budget surplus. We're now committed to deficit spending for the rest of Bush's term, and beyond.

This at a time when the economy is struggling to stay out of recession, thousands of jobs have been lost and cash-strapped state governments are slashing the services that poor people most need. It's a shameful performance.