Hey Shrub, Stimulate This!

By: Jeremy Rice

"The new Washington game", Joe Ronzburg said in these pages in August, "is to remove money from government and then to decide what our priorities are". This was before the inhuman attacks on the United States that have claimed hundreds of thousands of jobs and accelerated the decline of an already weak economy. It was also after the President won a tax cut in the name of limiting the power of the government.

As Bush and Democratic leaders square off over economic policy, it's tempting to make this a fight about the size of the deficit. But the real question is how we are going to provide relief to those who really need it. The Democrats must focus on people - not numbers - to win the budget battle and, more importantly, make the government work for us.

Aside from the President's recent self-promotion, no credible authorities support his recent efforts to "stimulate" the economy. Speeding up the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, says the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), according to this Washington Post report, will not substantially help us in the short term. Neither will repealing the corporate minimum tax, which has the added problem of being a retroactive reimbursement of millions of dollars to companies that have not been substantially hurt by recent events.

The CBO did suggest that short-term tax holidays and a tax rebate for those who didn't qualify for the initial one would provide a short-term kick. It also supported a one-year tax write-off for businesses that create jobs, a proposal Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle touted on Friday. These measures would put some money into people's pockets, and the hope is that this money would be spent faster if it was in the hands of people on the lower end of the economic scale.

Daschle is treading dangerous ground by advocating fiscal discipline. There's absolutely no support for a repeal of the gargantuan tax cut - passed with the help of 12 Democrats and one spineless independent - so we're not going to somehow regain this surplus, at least not in the near term. But there's no reason to have a surplus in the middle of a recession - and in the middle of a war, at that. A surplus doesn't help one person who has no health insurance or who lost such benefits when the economy collapsed. Nor does it create jobs or improve education. These are the issues on which all politicians should run, and financial issues should come second.

While Daschle did mention the need to shore up Social Security and Medicare, he didn't dramatize these issues or highlight specific short-term and long-term remedies to these problems. He mainly spoke in the kind of class language that is easily countered by plain-talking fokes like the Shrub. All Bush had to do Saturday to counter the Democratic economic rhetoric was to lie: "I challenge their economics when they tell you raising taxes will help the country recover. Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes."

Bush can take statements like this all the way to 2004 if Democrats limit themselves to ethereal issues like budget surpluses. The budget was in deficit for years and it never hurt an incumbent in either party. Domestically, it's the issues that affect us as individuals, not as a nation, that motivate voters. Daschle and Gephardt risk playing a GOP game if they get caught up in the rhetoric of "fiscal discipline" instead of advocating initiatives to fix the U.S. health care mess and help Americans find jobs and improve their wages.

Bush is more than attackable here. His only health care plan is to offer tax breaks to people who can't afford insurance - where this leaves people who don't earn enough to pay taxes is anyone's guess. He also pushed through an education bill that mandates state action without providing any funding to carry out the tasks. The Democratic leadership must do a better job of communicating these specific American needs, reminding voters of our priorities as we struggle for the quality of life that just one year ago we took for granted.

The Democrats already scored one technical victory in this war: A "stimulus" package with any of the Bush initiatives would have been devastating and would only have stimulated businesses that didn't need it. The Shrub agenda, as we have noted in this space so many times, is to drain the government of appropriate funding and then blame it for being inadequate. But as we've seen since Sept. 11, the government is necessary and isn't going away. Deficit or not, there are crucial programs that deserve funding, and the Democrats - some of them anyway - are our only shot in the near term at saving them.