Remora
The Post beats the Times for pungency, today, with its story about the Bush tax cut - about as fraudulent a piece of economic policy as a systems player's plan to beat the odds at blackjack at Trump Casino. Interesting, given the parallel between what Bush did on a national level and what he did in Texas. The same publicity driven tax cut, the same post budget repair work. The Times references further tax cuts to jumpstart the economy being mooted by both parties. It's beginning to feel a lot like a recession, so politicos are naturally getting antsy. The Post, however, revisits the budget which was passed this spring by the live wire Repugs and the cadaverous Dems, and guess what, my happy readers? Now that the budget is yesterday's papers, there's a lot of grinning and shuffling about how, shucks, the whole thing was sorta built out of fraudulent spending projections, taxes cut which will be supplanted by obscurer taxes revived, and the promise of consensual restraint on the part of Congress. Yeah, right. The last is like teaching abstinence in sex ed to teenagers - there's the gonad on the one side, and the rhetoric on the other. Which do you think is going to win?
Key Graf
Tax Cut Plan Filled With Dubious Spending Predictions (washingtonpost.com)

Discipline may indeed be needed. The tax package assumes that discretionary federal spending (about one-third of all spending) will grow annually by only 2.5 percent or less in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Such spending, however, has grown by an average of 6 percent annually for the past three years, and it hit 9.9 percent in 2001