Your Tax Dollars at Work
Now that the war in Iraq has loosened its grip
on the nation's attention, other more mundane
matters are again taking center stage: the Bush
administration's tax cut proposal, for instance.
For some time now, the administration has made
clear its goal of eliminating federal taxes on
dividends, and now such a plan—two of them,
actually—is making its way through
Congress.
Today, the House approved
its version of the Bush administration's tax cut
plan by a narrow margin. From a practical
perspective, this doesn't mean much, since the
Senate is working to approve a different version
later this week. Once that happens, then the two
legislative bodies will have to work with the White
House to find a way to reconcile the two. Talk
about the left hand not talking to the right.
Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of these
shenanigans is the fact that the Senate plan calls
for taxes to be raised in order to cut taxes.
Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) held the deciding
vote, and played her trump like a master bridge
player. Only agreeing to support the tax cut plan
if its cost didn't exceed $350 billion, she forced
lawmakers to revamp, fine-tune, polish, push and
shove their plan into a jury-rigged version that in
reality costs $433 billion. By creatively crunching
the numbers, they were able to make it cost $350
billion on the books—but only by raising taxes
to pay for the $83 billion difference. Only in
Washington could such logic make sense.
During my lunch break today, I turned on Fox
News and caught the tail end of an editorial by
Neil Cavuto. In two minutes' time, he expressed
more common sense than has come out of our nation's
capital in the past two years. In short, he
asserted that most people, when confronted by a
choice to either raise costs or cut services, would
support cutting services. To borrow his example, if
New Yorkers had to choose between bus prices rising
30 percent or bus routes being slashed 30 percent,
most would go for the latter. Most would simply
prefer to rearrange their lives as necessary to
make up for the lesser services in order to avoid
paying more, especially in these tight economic
times.
Unfortunately, most of our elected officials
don't understand such a practical mentality. I
think the word "cut," no matter how it is used,
does not exist in their vocabularies—except
for, perhaps, "I want a cut of that."
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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