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Who’s to Blame for the Deficits?
A Note on the Right’s RhetoricBy Daniel Skinner
George. W. Bush and behind-the-scenes Republican strategists complement each other well when developing a linguistic strategy to sell policy initiatives. While Bush has been able to market his stark inability to string complex sentences together as downhome Texas plainspeak, meanwhile his advisors have supplied him with extremely effective rhetorical tricks for selling policy. The latest component of this strategy is to convince the American public that by not making the Bush tax cut “permanent,” Democrats (and some Republican detractors) are actually proposing to raise taxes.
Tangential to this is the Administration’s efforts to shift the blame for the massive (and ever-increasing) deficit to Congress, while refusing to release numbers—even rough estimates—on the cost of the Iraq war. According to the non-partisan, non-ideological Washington weekly The Hill, Bush is also seeking new Line Item Veto powers from Congress.
The Line Item Veto, which allowed the president to remove lines from legislation passed by Congress and then sign the remaining provisions into law, was declared unconstitutional in 1998. According to the Hill, the proposed legislation would allow the president to “reject new appropriations, new mandatory spending, or limited grants of tax benefits (to 100 or fewer beneficiaries) whenever the president determines the spending or tax benefits are not essential government priorities.”
Confident that a rewritten veto law could pass constitutional muster, the Administration claims that the veto is necessary to get reign in irresponsible deficit spending by Congress (ostensibly on everything but defense spending), with the savings being deposited in a special account specifically allocated for reducing the deficit. Which expenses are most responsible for the deficit—the bloated and flawed Medicare bill, the war in Iraq, or the tax cut (which, by the way, the left might want to start calling an “expense”)—will determine how these issues are discussed and factor into the upcoming elections.