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May. 4th, 2008 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerMany thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wcg and his friends for pointing out this article by Lincoln Chafee about the fight over the Bush tax cuts. It's highly enlightening, describing hoe the Imperial Presidency used the idea of massive tax cuts to seduce Congress into a supine cowardice. This paragraph sums up the thrust of the idea:
"We are most successful, especially in tax policy, when we start to take tax ideas and do them a piece at a time," Hastert said. Grassley, too, called for taking it one step at a time, especially in a Senate equally divided. But the far-right wing was rabid about "starving the beast," cutting taxes so deeply it would bring back deficits and force deep cuts in social spending, programs they saw as inevitably building Democratic constituencies. Instead of pushing back against the administration's ferocious demands on its radical agenda, leaders found it easier to fall in line. And this was the critical time for pushing back, the spring of 2001; Americans were not dying yet in the president's nation-building projects in Southwest Asia.
wcg and his friends for pointing out this article by Lincoln Chafee about the fight over the Bush tax cuts. It's highly enlightening, describing hoe the Imperial Presidency used the idea of massive tax cuts to seduce Congress into a supine cowardice. This paragraph sums up the thrust of the idea:"We are most successful, especially in tax policy, when we start to take tax ideas and do them a piece at a time," Hastert said. Grassley, too, called for taking it one step at a time, especially in a Senate equally divided. But the far-right wing was rabid about "starving the beast," cutting taxes so deeply it would bring back deficits and force deep cuts in social spending, programs they saw as inevitably building Democratic constituencies. Instead of pushing back against the administration's ferocious demands on its radical agenda, leaders found it easier to fall in line. And this was the critical time for pushing back, the spring of 2001; Americans were not dying yet in the president's nation-building projects in Southwest Asia.
