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| published Wednesday, February 22, 2006 |
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By David S. Broder
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Back
when the late John Mitchell was attorney general in the Nixon
administration, he advised reporters, "Watch what we do, not what we
say."
That advice certainly applies to the Bush administration as well.
The latest bit of evidence to come to my attention is what you might
think of as the Case of the Disappearing Trillion.
The tip-off arrived last week in an e-mail from the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities. It is a Washington research organization
with a distinctly liberal point of view but a deserved reputation for
accuracy in its figures.
In this case, the information the center cites was confirmed to me
-- though with a very different interpretation -- by officials of the
White House Office of Management and Budget. It involves the treatment
in the budget of the Bush tax cuts passed by Congress in 2001 and 2003.
Those rate reductions, when enacted, had expiration dates of 2010,
designed to keep their long-term costs within the limits set by the
budget resolutions of which they were a part. The president is urging
Congress to make those tax cuts permanent, but his proposal is
controversial and has not yet passed.
This year, however, the budget the president submitted on Feb. 6
simply assumes that the tax cuts have been made permanent -- and thus
includes them in the "baseline" for all future years.
The effect, according to the center's analysis, is that
"legislation to make these tax cuts permanent will be scored as having
no cost whatsoever."
In fact, this analysis says, "The administration's proposal, by
changing the rules after the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were enacted but
before they are extended, would ensure that the cost of continuing the
tax cuts in the years after the current sunset dates would never be
counted. The costs in those years were not counted when the tax cuts
were first enacted. . . . Now, the administration is proposing that the
tax cuts for those years also be ignored when the tax cuts are
extended. To fail ever to count the cost of the tax cuts in the years
after the sunset dates . . . would represent one of the largest and
most flagrant budget gimmicks in recent memory."
How large? The Congressional Budget Office scores the cost of
making these tax cuts permanent at $1.6 trillion over the next decade.
The administration's estimate is somewhat less -- $1.35 trillion.
But,
the folks at the OMB told me, it's wrong to claim that they are hiding
that cost. They told me to get out my copy of the budget, and they told
me right where to look. And sure enough on Column 8, Line 11 of Table
S-7 on Page 324 of the green-bordered book, I found the very figure
they had cited -- $1.35 trillion.
The heading on the chart of Effects of Proposals on Receipts reads:
"Make Permanent Certain Tax Cuts Enacted in 2001 and 2003 (assumed in
the baseline)." Those last four words conceal more than a trillion
dollars worth of lost revenue.
But that is not all, my OMB friends argued. If you turn to a
396-page volume called Analytical Perspectives, as any conscientious
citizen should do, on Page 215 and again on Page 360, you will also
find acknowledgment of the change in the bookkeeping. The key passage
says, without elaboration, that "the 2001 Act and 2003 Act provisions
were not intended to be temporary, and not extending them in the
baseline raises inappropriate procedural roadblocks to extending them
at current rates."
That sentence must be parsed. The basis for saying those two tax
cuts were "not intended to be temporary" is that when Bush recommended
them to Congress, he said they should be permanent. But Congress put
time limits on them -- which Bush now finds it inconvenient to
acknowledge.
And those "inappropriate procedural roadblocks to extending them"?
Translation: If you tell Congress the cost of making those tax cuts
permanent, lawmakers might have second thoughts about doing it.
In fact, it turns out that Bush tried to get Congress to go along
with this bookkeeping switch back in 2004, actually submitting
legislation to authorize the change. The House refused to accept it. He
put it back in his budget last year, with the same result. But this
year he's back again, with more urgency, as he presses the case to make
these tax cuts permanent.
Now that you know exactly how easy it is to find this all explained
in the budget, I'm sure you are as reassured as I am about the candor
of this administration.
Washington Post
davidbroder@washpost.com
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