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Selling Bush's tax cut plan
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- While President Bush and members of his administration are fanning out across the country this week to salvage the president's tax cut proposal, one leading Democrat told me he's flabbergasted that despite public statements that the tax cut is being scaled down, the president still will end up with a huge tax cut. Last month, a few moderate Senate Republicans cut a deal with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, to cap the tax cut within the overall budget resolution at $350 billion over 10 years -- less than half the $726 billion tax cut the president wanted. The House of Representatives passed the original Bush plan, but is now moving to downsize it in an effort to reach a compromise with the Senate. Despite speculation that the White House will agree to phase in or scale back some of the key pieces of the package, such as the elimination of the dividend tax, Secretary of Commerce Don Evans insists he's still fighting for the President Bush's entire tax cut package. But -- referring to Congress' arcane method of counting revenues and expenditures -- Evans admitted that "it looks unlikely he'll get the full plan inside the budget resolution process, but...we can request additional tax cuts outside the budget resolution process." On "Inside Politics" Tuesday, Evans argued that with the war winding down, the tax plan's main objective is creating jobs. But he also said the full Bush tax cut provides both a short- and long-term shot-in-the-arm the economy needs. "You know, the war is obviously moving behind us," he said. "That's going to create more certainty for people in this economy, more confidence, I think, more consumer confidence, more investors confidence, more business confidence, but, you know, I think all elements of this plan are very, very important, not only for short-term stimulus but for medium and long-term stimulus as well." Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the leading Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, says the administration's strategy of pursuing its tax cut on two different tracks -- one through the budgetary vehicle called "reconciliation" which requires any new tax cuts to be paid for with offsetting spending cuts, and another through a separate bill which wouldn't require new tax cuts to be paid for -- is misleading. Conrad believes that the overall tax cut could be close to $2 trillion if items such as child care tax credits, marriage penalty relief, estate tax reform and interest are taken into account. Despite the large addition to the budget deficit, the separation of these more popular tax cuts -- likely in Congress' overall budget package -- means the administration won't have to explain how they pay for them. "The whole thing borders on insanity," Conrad told me in a phone conversation. Commenting on the size of the tax cut package, when taken with the budget deficit and spending priorities, Conrad said, "It is stunning in terms of lack of fiscal responsibility." President Bush will make another push for his plan in Ohio on Thursday, home state of Sen. George Voinovich, one of the moderate Republican senators who voted against the full tax cut, saying it would add to a growing deficit. While some political observers view the trip as applying pressure to Voinovich to get the tax cut number up closer to the original Bush proposal, Evans dismissed the widely held notion that there was any distance between the president and the moderate Republicans who are responsible for slashing the president's $726 billion plan. Despite ads paid for by a pro-tax cut group called The Club for Growth, lambasting Voinovich in his home state as a "Franco Republican," and similar ads in Maine against its Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, Evans insisted, "We're going to continue to work with them. They're our friends, they're our allies. They've been great supporters of the president. They really were strong advocates of the president's 2001 tax cut and part of this plan, what we're talking about doing is accelerating the tax cuts that were approved two years ago." Judy Woodruff is CNN's prime anchor and senior correspondent. She also anchors "Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics," weekdays at 3:30 pm ET.
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