You may have seen some of those new definitions of patriotism. Hoarding Cipro, for instance, is arguably unpatriotic, as the columnist Michael Kinsley has noted. It favors the I-got-mine individual over the needs of the country at a time of crisis. The guy who stole those watches from the destroyed jewelry store at Ground Zero wasn’t just a criminal, he was stomping on the flag-taking advantage of a wounded nation.
No piece of legislation can be in the same category, of course. I’m sure the sponsors believe they are acting in the national interest, and intentionality counts for a lot these days. (For instance, the United States does not intend to harm civilians; the terrorists do). But the normal willingness to bow to special interests and favor the few over the many takes on a new coloration in the weeks after Sept. 11. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, while joining President Bush in support of the bill, admitted recently that it was “show business,” by which he meant it was merely a symbol–a bone for particular interests–that will inevitably be changed by the more responsible Senate. This is not the time for “show business” among our elected officials. Acting piggish just now might not be burning the flag, but it’s sure not respecting it either.
Let’s review some of the basics of the bill, so you can see what I’m talking about. First of all, the package is aimed at giving huge tax breaks to big business, $112 billion in the next two years. If this was what the country needed right now, that would be fine. But beyond some accelerated depreciation of assets (an uncontroversial part of the bill), no economist would argue that building new industrial capacity is the route to recovery. The Federal Reserve says we have more unused capacity than at any time since 1983, at the end of the last big recession.
Dick Armey, for one, claims to be an economist. But he obviously never learned about a little concept familiar to every college freshman called “supply and demand.” Our supply–or capacity–is just fine right now; in fact, we’ve got too much of it. The problem is consumer demand. It’s dangerously flat. Yet in the House bill that just passed, the personal tax cuts desperately needed to juice the economy are less than half of the business cuts, and they aren’t targeted directly enough at the middle and lower ends, where the money will be channeled into the economy more quickly. (For the record, I’ve favored immediate personal tax cuts all along; it was the big cuts for the rich in later years that I found repugnant).
The lobbyists were really feeding at the trough on this one. They managed to get the craven House leadership to eliminate something called the “alternative minimum tax.” This was enacted during the Reagan administration after a lot of publicity about huge corporations not paying a nickel in taxes. The idea was that every profitable corporation should pay something on April 15. Getting rid of this tax has always been a goal of corporate lobbyists, but this time they succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. The GOP bill, which passed on close to a straight party-line vote, gets rid of the tax retroactively to 1986. That means a huge windfall, not for struggling small business but for corporate giants.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, IBM could receive $1.4 billion, General Motors $832 million and General Electric $671 million. And the average working stiff?
Stiffed.
The bill isn’t all bad. It’s got $12 billion to help states pay unemployment compensation. And it contains some help for the 34 million Americans too poor to get last summer’s rebate. But by and large, it’s so bad that even Senate Republicans won’t be able to stomach it. They are expected to all but ignore the House bill and strong-arm the House side in the conference committee. The repeal of the alternative minimum tax is not expected to survive the process.
But that might be underestimating the grip of corporate lobbyists and the world view of the House leadership. Tom DeLay, for instance, seems to believe that not too much has changed since the terrorist attacks. His fear of unions is apparently so great that he’d rather keep the minimum-wage private “security” firms at work securing our airports than to federalize and professionalize the system. He seems to think our airport security is better than that of, say, Israel. What planet is he living on?
Meanwhile, DeLay apparently didn’t much mind that Pat Robertson had heartily agreed with Jerry Falwell that the United States had it coming on Sept. 11 because of our moral standards. The House whip went ahead and appeared on Robertson’s show anyway. Imagine if a Democrat had turned up on a TV show hosted by a “Blame America Firster.” He would have been crucified.
Not DeLay. The Project on Conservative Reform, a hard-hitting and sensible outfit, has criticized him, but no one else on the right has that I’ve noticed. The House of Representatives–the “People’s House”–is in the grip of old and unhelpful thinking. Someone should clue them in: It’s not September 10th any more.
