President ready for battle -- with Congress

By Mark Alexander · Friday, January 10, 2003

President George W. Bush returned to Washington, DC this week ready for battle, and he greeted the 108th Congress Republicans with an immediate offensive -- but of the political rather than the martial variety -- unveiling a $670 billion tax cut for families, including those in the so-called "investor class." The president's plan calls for last year's tax cuts to: 1) be fully instituted immediately rather than phased in, and 2) to be made permanent. The plan also boosts deductions for dependents, provides increases in education vouchers, reduces the "marriage penalty," eliminates the death tax, provides tax reductions for small business, and removes some double taxation of dividends. In short, it is a bold conservative proposal.

Mr. Bush's vision for economic renewal is, on the whole, based around one simple principle, as he surmised: "Our first challenge is to help Americans keep more of their money." "There is no better way to help our economy grow," the president concluded, "than to leave more money in the hands of the men and women who earned it." President Ronald Reagan was the first president in generations to argue that your money is, in fact, your money. President Bush has just taken up that mantle.

And setting the stage for a street brawl, the $674 billion stimulus proposal also calls for tort and regulatory reform. Indeed, it is time to put an end to the "legal lotto," and the enormous "concealed tax" burden of regulation -- higher product costs. The president stated that the central government does not control the economy, but does have the responsibility to remove obstacles standing in the way of free enterprise.

For their part, the anti-American Left has only one strategic policy in its political black bag -- divide and conquer. Whether the issue is race, religion, gender, sexual "preference" or your money, Sociocrats are constantly endeavoring to divide the nation into "us versus them" camps. When it comes to your money, the Sociocrats take their cue from Voltaire: "In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." Thus, the classist rehash of "the people versus the powerful" theme re-emerged to counter President Bush's plan to reduce taxes.

And Sociocrats depend on one tactical tool -- control the debate using their army of sycophants in the Leftmedia. Together, the political and chattering tribes conspire to control the debate by manipulating the vernacular: government spending becomes "investment," tax cuts "cost" the government, letting you keep your money becomes "a rebate," and they ask questions like can government "afford the tax cuts" and suggest that reducing taxes causes deficits when anyone with half a wit knows that SPENDING causes deficits.

Memo to the Left on the pedagogy of the English language: You're not "investing" by granting "rebates," because the money isn't yours to invest -- it belongs to the people who pay taxes. And who was the brilliant Sociocrat who pegged tax bracketing as "progressive" while a flat tax would be "regressive"? V.I. Lenin could not have scripted better Socialist talking points for the Left.

For a year, Sociocrats held the president's Homeland Security Department hostage, because they knew that the reorganization would expose redundancies, and the 170,000 personnel in the HomSec department may be downsized to about 130,000 -- many of those cuts targeting union members on whose scalped dues Demo campaigns depend. For the Left, protecting its union payola takes priority over national security. Now, the Left wants to hold tax reductions hostage, arguing that we can't "afford" to cut taxes given the cost of the ongoing war with Jihadistan and the probable occupation of Iraq.

But what scares the Demos most is that they know President Bush can, and will, use his bully pulpit to make the case that fiscal discipline is the solution -- reducing the size and scope of the central government. Reducing tax revenue will provide conservative legislators good reason to demonstrate fiscal restraint by rallying around the constitutional mandates of the federal government; particularly, funding national defense and de-funding social programs. They can take their cue from the Constitution's author, James Madison, who said, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...." Or if they prefer, Thomas Jefferson, who penned, "Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated."

Aggressive tax cuts could not come at a better time. There are sufficient resources to fund constitutional mandates -- the war and/or military occupation of Iraq, development of a comprehensive missile defense system and the maintenance of our essential military commitments around the world. The best way to grow the national economy (and, by extension, the global economy) is to downsize the federal government for a change, instead of the private sector.

In other news...

The nuclear needle is still in the haystack, and, as The Federalist has noted previously, the haystack does not stop at Iraq's borders. One good reason we signed on to the UN's cat and mouse game with Saddam is that every day on the ground provides additional intelligence collection. Head of the UN weapons inspection program Hans Blix told the UN Security Council Thursday, "We have now been [in Iraq] for some two months and been covering the country in ever wider sweeps and we haven't found any smoking guns."

Of course, absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. There are enormous gaps in Iraq's documentation of its weapons programs and Saddam still refuses to let inspectors question his stable of nuclear scientists and engineers. To assist the inspectors, the U.S. is now sharing limited but significant intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs.

As The Federalist has surmised, "regime change" translates "kill Saddam," and he and his henchmen know that. As we stated months ago, given our new inventory of low-yield nuclear bunker augers capable of vaporizing Saddam in his deepest bunker, there remains a distinct possibility that Saddam's survival instincts will kick in, and he and his generals will seek asylum from one of Iraq's allies -- Algeria or, say, France. We estimate that the reaction in Baghdad to Saddam's departure would be similar to that in Kabul when the Taliban tucked tail. Of course Baghdad is a far more civilized place than Kabul, and the "nation building" in Iraq might be faster and less expensive than some predict.

And early this week, President Bush stressed, "We have no intention of invading North Korea," despite the fact it has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that bars it from making nuclear weapons. All this rattling of sabers is the result of North Korea's dangerous game of nuclear blackmail -- an effort to get more resources and financial aid for the failed Communist regime.

Quote of the week...

"Today's 'stimulus package' is psychotherapy for a nation that very recently has become too fixated on the stock market, which has declined three consecutive years for the first time since 1939-41. But the stock market and the economy are not identical, and indeed they have diverged -- the market slump has been more severe than the recent recession, the mildest since 1945." --George Will

On cross-examination...

"If class warfare erupts, corporations and Wall Street only have themselves to blame. Three decades ago, the chief executives of the largest 100 companies earned 39 times what the average worker made. Now that amount is 1,000 times more." --Financial analyst and commentator Don Bauder.

Open Query...

"The central question in this debate is not whether government should decide how much money it will allow us to keep. Rather, it is how much of our money we will allow the government to spend." --Cal Thomas