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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/08/25/bush_second_term/index.htmlAnd you thought his first term was a nightmareWhat Bush has planned for America if he wins.
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By Charles Tiefer
Aug. 25, 2004 | .... Under Bush's slogan of an "
ownership society," the Republicans intend a long-term effort,
using changes in Medicare, Social Security and taxes to pit
better-off and worse-off Democrats against each other, offering all-but-irresistible incentives for some to desert the others -- and any progressive national coalition. .... A second-term Bush agenda will constantly impale Democrats on the dilemma of abandoning their poorer, sicker, older and minority groups, or seeing their better-off, healthier and younger members lured off to the other party. If it sounds like a political nightmare for the Democrats, that's because that's what it is planned to be. ....
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040906fa_fact.... When the President pledges to create an “era of
ownership,” he is not talking merely about encouraging people to buy their own homes and start small businesses. To conservative Republicans who understand his
coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the
tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about
allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to
curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the
abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people. ....
...the theme of ownership. He may well talk about establishing investment accounts within Social Security, as well as Retirement Savings Accounts and Lifetime Savings Accounts outside of Social Security, and health savings accounts, which his economic advisers view as a step toward individual, portable health-care coverage. .... “The
biggest demographic shift in the past thirty years is not the number of people who speak Spanish; it is the
number of Americans who own stocks,” Norquist told me. “It was twenty per cent of adults when Reagan was elected. Now it is sixty per cent, and seventy per cent of voters.”
...
returning to a balanced budget will be even harder this time around. A decade ago, it took “
tax hikes, a sharp
contraction in military spending, and an unprecedented
economic expansion to achieve fiscal consolidation,” the I.M.F. noted.
None of those things are on the horizon now. ....
“It is the
height of deception to say we can only budget till 2009 but we are going to have massive tax cuts from 2010 onward,” Gale said. “That is what the Administration has done.” ....
...a historic
restructuring of the American system of government. .... If Bush’s economic agenda was fully enacted, the vast bulk of these payments wouldn’t be taxed at all, and
labor would end up shouldering practically the entire burden of financing the federal government. ....
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