Bush gets his gimmicky tax cut while a $400 child credit for millions of low-wage families is eliminated. Are his critics suffering from outrage exhaustion?

May 30 � Under the glittering chandeliers of the East Room of the White House, President Bush signed into law the most wealth-oriented tax bill in history.

The interests of the invited guests, mostly prosperous looking men in dark blue suits, were well-represented when congressional leaders put the finishing touches on the bill, preserving Bush�s dividend tax cut while a $400 child credit for millions of low-wage families was eliminated.

It was one of those nuggets that exposes the truth. Bush�s tax cut was never about economic stimulus, or the rebate would have been directed toward the people who will spend it, not the rich who just get richer. Senate and House conferees brushed away the crumbs slated for those making barely more than minimum wage in order to maintain the fiction that the bill comes in under the Senate�s $350 billion cap. In a bill already loaded with gimmicks, couldn�t they have found one more phony accounting device to preserve the one tax break that makes economic and social sense?

When I put that question to a Republican staffer, he said there was no one in the room who cared, not the principals, not the staff, and they didn�t need Democrat Blanche Lincoln�s vote anymore. She was the lawmaker who pressed the Senate to expand the child credit to include more low-income parents. Almost half the taxpayers in Lincoln�s home state of Arkansas report taxable incomes of less than $20,000. Under the bill�s formula, families earning between $10,500 and $26,625 will not benefit. The GOP staffer went on to say he didn�t know whether his party was moved more by hubris or money, but he did know the people who just got screwed weren�t at the president�s dinner last week when Bush raised $22 million for Republican campaigns.

Bush�s critics inside and outside his party are suffering from outrage exhaustion. How much can Bush get away with before the public and the media hold him accountable? If this shameful provision is not repealed, 11.9 million children, or one of every six children under 17 ,will be shortchanged according to The Center on Budget and Priorities, an admittedly liberal group, but whose facts are not disputed. Keep an eye on the media and whether the networks pick up the story, first reported in Thursday�s New York Times. If the Times story resonates, Karl Rove and his tag team of compassionate conservatives will do damage control, pledging perhaps to correct the omission with another tax bill in the fall, which they will see as an opportunity to push through still more cuts for upper-income voters.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are upset about the administration�s arrogance. They�re tired of getting the brush-off when they ask what happened to the weapons of mass destruction allegedly in Iraq and where�s the administration�s plan for the war�s aftermath? Negative sentiment is growing as Congress comes to grips with the length of time (years, not months) and money (billions) and manpower (hundreds of thousands) it will take to rebuild Iraq. Just as Bush dissembled on the cost of the war, refusing to put a price tag on it until the bombs were falling, he hasn�t come clean with Congress or the American people about the war�s aftermath, or how it will squeeze domestic programs.

The economic rationale for this tax cut is dubious, but its political impact is clear. It�s a cynical device to re-elect the president and put the country in hock. One Senate Republican dubs it �The Rangers Relief Act,� after the newly created category of Bush donors who contribute at least $200,000 to his re-election. (The Pioneers used to be the high-rollers at $100,000 plus; now the Rangers, named after the baseball team Bush owned, are the heavy hitters.) �The tax cut reimburses the donors before they�ve given,� says the Senate Republican, noting the added benefit of starving the government of resources to support the programs that Democrats typically champion, like Social Security and Medicare.

More than 2 million jobs have been lost since Bush became president, yet it feels in Washington as if we�re living in a second Gilded Age. Worries about income inequality or imbalance are treated like quaint notions from another era. A report touts a new casino opening in Atlantic City that will feature thousand-dollar coins for slot machines. The clientele it hopes to attract won�t be spending the milk money. Richer Americans send their children to private schools, so who cares if Bush�s much heralded �No Child Left Behind� education bill is woefully underfunded. There is no counterbalance to the corporate priorities of the Bush administration and the shifting of the tax burden to lower-earning Americans in order to free up the capital of the rich. Still, it is a gamble for Bush. If the economy doesn�t recover sufficiently, can he blame it on the Democrats for not giving him everything he wanted?

� 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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May 31, 2003

Protection on the Cheap

President Bush's budgets have generally shortchanged environmental programs. His proposed budget for all discretionary (nonfarm) environmental protection programs for fiscal 2004 is down $1.6 billion, or 5 percent, from actual spending in 2002. These numbers do not really register, however, until you suddenly wake up to the fact that for want of a few million strategically placed dollars, programs essential to the government's ability to carry out important environmental laws have been compromised. There have been two distressing examples of this in the last week alone.

The first involves the system the Environmental Protection Agency uses to enforce Clean Water Act limits on pollution from factories, municipal water-treatment systems and the like. The system compares each site's actual monthly discharges against its allowable maximums, and the ones that exceed their limits are subject to fines.

Laudably, the administration has tried to replace a creaky manual system of reporting with computers that transmit data quickly to federal authorities. But the new system is full of bugs. Until they are eliminated, which could take three years, factories and plants will be able to discharge pollutants undetected. The agency says it simply does not have the $14 million required to fix things and needs new money from Congress. That reflects not just bad planning but indifference at the Office of Management and Budget to clear environmental needs.

Meanwhile, Interior Department officials announced this week that they had almost run out of the money needed to satisfy two basic obligations under the Endangered Species Act: identifying and listing new species that deserve protection, and designating "critical habitat" for each species' recovery. Echoing complaints from previous administrations, the department says the habitat requirement is not only expensive but unnecessary because listing a species as threatened or endangered confers as high level of protection to begin with. Still, habitat designation is required by law, and until Congress changes that law, the department should have the wherewithal to carry it out.

The department obviously needs more than the miserly $12 million budgeted for listing and habitat designation. The issue here, as with water pollution, is whether 30-year-old programs that command broad public support can do more than simply limp along. When the time comes to appropriate money for these programs, Congress should make sure they not only survive but also flourish.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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I'll try to get in a proper update tomorrow...busy as the proverbial beaver, that is I!

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