Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) has proposed an extension of the child tax credit to low-income families. One wonders if the Democrats will complain that such a cut, which if made permanent could cost $93 billion, will increase the national debt and bankrupt the country. If the Democrat’s newfound sense of "fiscal responsibility" is true, they would veto the bill. However, something makes me feel that they won’t.
Once again the Republicans turn out to be the big winners. They preserve their needed cut on dividends and investment, and they get to increase the overall size of tax relief for all Americans. I almost wonder if this wasn’t the plan the whole time… then again, I doubt that congressional Republicans are quite that devious.
Of course this was their plan all along. They first wanted to pass every possible penny of giveaways they could to their constituency, and then use the bone they planned to offer for the other party’s constituency as a political pawn to entrap the Democrats. They can pass a tax credit that would go to people who could potentially produce some economic stimulus, but in order to do so they have to aid and abet Bush’s fiscal destruction of America. These are the sorts of games the majority party can play to make the opposition look bad. It may very well work, but the country is so financially devastated at this point, nothing we really do at this point matters anyway because the diagnosis is incurable after what was done last week.
As for the Democrats “newfound sense of fiscal responsibility”, it isn’t so new. At least compared to the GOP, Democrats have worn the crown of fiscal responsibility since 1981 when tax-cutting the nation into bankruptcy first became fashionable. I said half-jokingly last week that “Bush signed his latest tax cut on Thursday, meaning that Republicans were hard at work on Friday crafting their next massive tax cut proposal.” Apparently, I was right.
Given unfettered control of government (which we’re dangerously close to now), the GOP supply-side stooges would be like sex addicts in a whorehouse, doling out tax cut after tax cut to millionaires and billionaires with reckless abandon until the country was bankrupt. They are powerless to control their tax-cutting urges and my guess it they could bankrupt the government in a month. With minimal Democratic resistance presently, it may take them five years to pull it off. That’s soon enough for most people, but there’s no highway to bankruptcy that can be travelled fast enough to satisfy the Republicans.