Original Sin
by digby
Chuck Todd: Senator Breaux, I’ve got to ask you. Any regrets about that vote, looking at what we’re facing today, looking at the politics, all the back and forth, any regrets about how that vote went down in 2001?”
Breaux: No Chuck. I think the result of it was a pretty strong economy where the economy was growing. I think now this compromise is something that should be supported.
Just a reminder here that Bush’s economy was propped up by a huge, unsustainable housing bubble, income inequality went through the roof, job growth was extremely anemic and it ended in the most spectacular financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Other than that, though, it was terrific.
But you can’t blame him. He was covering his ass for being a major player in one of the greatest GOP punks in history:
In reality, the hostage takers laid their “trap” a decade ago, as former Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett helpfully explained to The Daily Beast: “We knew that, politically, once you get [a big tax cut] into law, it becomes almost impossible to remove it. That’s not a bad legacy. The fact that we were able to lay the trap does feel pretty good, to tell you the truth.”
Republicans have dominated the tax-cut debate because they have consistently kept their long-term objective in mind and skillfully, if ruthlessly, designed their initiatives to achieve it. Indeed, they’ve counted on the fact that most of us have short memories — including, alas, journalists who say they want to keep politicians honest.
In our 2005 book Off Center, we summed up the Republican tax-cut strategy as follows:
Republicans carefully calibrated their presentation of the tax cuts to circumvent hostile public opinion. Three strategies were central — each attuned to the tax cuts’ principal liabilities. First, unrealistic projections of federal surpluses and of the costs of the tax changes were used to justify the tax cuts and obscure their effects on competing priorities. Second, Republican leaders managed the legislative agenda to prevent consideration of the tax cuts’ specific effects on valued programs. And third, tax-cut advocates worked assiduously to make the cuts look far less tilted in favor of the rich and well connected than they really were…
To respond to their base, Republicans misled most Americans. On an unprecedented scale, phase-ins, sunsets, and time bombs were used to give the tax cuts of 2001 the most attractive public face possible while systematically stacking the deck in favor of Republicans’ long-term aims. From top to bottom, Republicans larded the tax cuts with features that made sense only for the purposes of political manipulation.
No matter how you slice it, Breaux and his Democratic cohorts were either willing sell-outs or dupes. You can’t blame him for not wanting to admit it now that the chickens have come home to roost.
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