The Texas Two Step

The Bush administration represents a group that has been around along time. They are Social Darwinists and neo feudalists who hate the idea of government helping people; the hate everything the New Deal has done and stands for. They have been waiting in the wings for 60 plus years but these programs are popular and politicians supporting their abolishment cannot be elected. They have a new weapon, the ignorant flat earth crowd who will vote one or two social issues and ignore everything else. Isaac Shapiro explains how they plan on killing the New Deal in his commentary Deficit Dance. They plan on doing it by starving the government and the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy was step 1.

The first step was to enact, in a series of bills adopted from 2001 through 2004, extremely large tax cuts. This year alone those tax cuts will total $215 billion. High-income households will reap most of the gains, with the top 20 percent of earners receiving 70 percent of the tax cuts. Roughly $47 billion of the cuts will go to the top 1 percent, a group with average incomes of about $1 million.
These tax cuts were not paid for. Their costs simply were added to the national debt. Largely as a consequence, the deficit remains quite substantial several years into a recovery. Concern about the debt and deficit is mounting.

That brings us to step 2 which is just beginning.

Now comes step two. The administration is saying that it is concerned about the budget deficit and that the rising cost of federal programs is the culprit. Expenditures for federal programs are blamed even though federal spending, measured as a share of the economy, is slightly below the average of recent decades, while federal revenue as a share of the economy has plunged to its lowest level in 45 years.

The administration says it is considering a freeze in domestic discretionary spending. If maintained over a number of years, such a freeze would necessitate substantial reductions in services dear to most of us -- the services delivered through federal funding for education, child care, environmental protection, veterans' health care, housing and other programs. The administration also may propose to alter significantly the Medicaid program -- which provides health insurance for low-income children, parents, and elderly and disabled people -- in a way that would ultimately result in dramatic erosion of the health care coverage or benefits this program provides.

This is where the Texas Two Step comes in. With a three or four year gap between steps 1 and 2 it is easier to make it appear that the two are unrelated. This was the plan, starve the government first thus making drastic cuts in social welfare programs in addition to cuts in the dreaded environmental and workers safety programs.

Beware the Texas two-step. It represents deceptive budgeting. The trade-offs between tax cuts conferring lavish benefits on the most-well-off and reductions in programs upon which millions of Americans rely should be made clear. The public should be allowed to assess directly whether it wants the government to shrink programs related to health care, child care and protecting the environment so that millionaires can continue receiving tax cuts that cost tens of billions of dollars a year.