War Criminals
John Young
jya at pipeline.com
Wed Oct 24 10:18:01 PDT 2001
Paul Krugman, Economic Columnist, New York Times, 24 October 2001:
At worst, war bonds will offer a lower return than ordinary bonds.
And if some people buy them nonetheless, what will they finance?
Here's where that tax bill enters the picture. The remarkable thing
about the 'stimulus' package that passed the Ways and Means
Committee on a straight party-line vote is that it barely even pretends
to serve its ostensible function. It consists largely of permanent tax
cuts, not the temporary cuts that you would expect in a stimulus
package. It systematically gives money to those least likely to
spend it, that is, to high-income taxpayers, and above all to large
corporations.
Some of the provisions in the House bill are simply mind-boggling.
For example, there is a large *retroactive* tax cut for corporations
that would lead to immediate rebates of hundreds of millions of
dollars to *each* of a select list of giant companies, many of them
in the energy industry (though the $1.4 billion check to I.B.M. would
top the list).
On the other hand, there is almost nothing in the bill for people who
might actually need more money. The extra unemployment benefits,
in particular, are far less generous than those offered in the last
recession, when the elder Bush was president. The bill, in short,
looks as if it was written by corporate lobbyists -- and it probably
was. Even Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was evidently
embarrassed by the bill, dismissing its more outlandish
components as 'show business' designed to impress campaign
donors.
But his remark was naove. Those lobbyists are serious men, who
are paid by their employers to deliver results, not gestures; they
wouldn't have put those provisions in unless they thought they
had enough power to get them enacted. And sure enough, the
White House soon contradicted Mr. O'Neill; the president,
declared Ari Fleischer, was 'very pleased' with the House bill.
Which brings us back to those war bonds. The government not
only isn't calling for shared sacrifice; it is 'very pleased' with a
proposal to give billions in handouts to corporations. And in that
case, what is someone who buys a war bond really helping to
finance? Put it this way: If the House has its way, the government
will give far more in tax breaks to corporations over the next year
than it will spend fighting terrorism. Yet somehow one suspects
that people would not rush to buy 'corporate tax-cut bonds.'
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