Kind of old, but still relevant.
"During the 2000 election, Bush's proposed tax cuts appeared reasonable to many voters only because the federal government seemed to have plenty of money to spare, thanks to the fiscal turnaround of the Clinton years. Then in the past year, with the economy slumping, the administration has sold another round of cuts as a timely stimulus for renewed growth despite soaring deficits. Whatever the size of the package finally approved by Congress this year, these cuts will not be the end. The White House is already thinking about another round and, according to The Washington Post, plans to cut taxes every year Bush is in office.
Republican members of Congress, who in the mid-1990s were pushing a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets, have learned to stop worrying and love fiscal bombs. Even their own Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the tax cuts they're about to pass will produce ballooning deficits. And with the aging of the baby-boom population, the federal government faces predictable increases in Medicare and other obligations that it cannot possibly meet with the reduced tax levels the Bush policies would leave behind.
The underlying strategy here is all too familiar: Instead of challenging popular liberal programs directly, the Republicans are creating fiscal conditions that make those programs unsustainable. In 1981 the Reagan administration slashed taxes, deliberately intending -- as Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, later disclosed -- to starve the federal government of funds, force reductions in domestic spending and keep new liberal initiatives off the agenda. Republicans dominated national policy for a decade as a result. That the tax cuts plunged the country into a fiscal disaster was merely a side effect of a policy that conservatives continue to hold up as a model of presidential leadership.
It was a Democratic Congress that began to rectify the problem, forcing the elder George Bush in 1990 to accept a tax increase in a concession on his part to fiscal prudence widely thought on the right to be an unforgivable blunder. Bill Clinton followed the same politically thankless path, raising taxes and cutting expenditures in 1993 in the interests of long-term budget balance and suffering the consequences in the 1994 congressional elections. It took us a decade to work our way out of the fiscal hangover of the Reagan years -- and here we are again, not so much with Bush II as with Reagan II, as the Republicans once again cut taxes while sharply raising military expenditures."
http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/6/starr-p.htmlMost of us thought that it was just stupidity to cut taxes during a war. But, maybe it is actually RW Social Darwinism that is the reason behind this.
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