When Mr. Bush spoke from Jackson Square in New Orleans, there was some hope that the government would set aside the "tax cut and borrow" approach that it has followed for four years and give priority to developing a sustainable fiscal policy that adequately addresses the needs of the poor. Health care, housing, jobs--those are real needs that people in the Gulf disaster area, as well as poor families across the country, must satisfy if they are to be able to develop their potential and join the larger community as equals. An investment of public funds in expanding human capital in the Gulf region could pay dividends long into the future for the nation. What we need is the equivalent of the post-WWII Marshall Plan for the Gulf region.
As noted in my last post, however, it appears that conservatives will push for the same old ideas that they always push, many of them based in tax expenditures for corporations, "balanced" by reduction of entitlement programs. Their ideas include issuing vouchers for private schools, using the tax code to provide enterprize zones, providing more tax cuts for the wealthy, and elimination of more benefits for the poor. The hope is fading that Congress would pull back from its planned cuts to benefit programs in the face of Katrina's exposure of needy Americans. Instead, it looks like benefit cuts will be increased to pay for the conservatives' version of disaster relief, according to this story in the New York Times.
The conservatives claim that their ideas are new, compared to the "failed" liberal ideas. The fact is, liberal ideas haven't failed, they simply have not been sufficiently funded. Even extraordinarily successful programs like HeadStart struggle to maintain funding.
And the conservative ideas aren't new--they have been tried at least since Reagan's presidency. As discussed in the last post, enterprise zones, being proposed as the cure-all for New Orleans--have de minimis effect on sustainable economic growth and job creation. The tax incentives offered by enterprise zones mainly provide windfalls to those businesses that would be in the area anyway. Tax cuts for the wealthy combined with benefit cuts for the poor--an additional $70 billion package of tax reductions authorized last spring and now $50 billion of benefit cuts to food stamps, Medicaid and other programs--will more likely limit growth than spur it. We can expect as a result the further stagnation of the hopes of a population that is least able to help itself, and the further privileging of a wealthy population for whom the marginal utility of the windfall tax savings is negligible.
Recent Comments