Congress of Scrooges
A Times EditorialThe heartless deficit-reduction bills produced this week show that lawmakers lack the political will to really cut spending.
Published November 19, 2005
Watching Congress and the Bush administration try to restrain spending is like watching a football team at a salad bar. Their heart isn't in it. In fact, after both houses of Congress eked out mean-spirited deficit-reduction bills this week, there is reason to believe they don't have a heart.
Who should suffer the financial consequences of a costly war, growing deficits and reckless tax cuts? If your answer is the sick, the poor and students, then there could be a place for you in Washington.
The House came up with an insignificant $50-billion in savings Friday morning by cutting student-loan subsidies, food stamps for low-income working families and child-support enforcement. Believe it or not, it could have been worse.
Moderate Republicans joined Democrats in rejecting a similar bill late Thursday that would have nearly tripled the cuts to those programs. And in case it isn't clear who rates sympathy in the Republican-controlled House, that body immediately took up a tax-cut extension on dividends and capital gains - which would more than wipe out the savings gained on the backs of the poor.
The Senate was somewhat kinder, though its savings would be a piddling $35-billion. Its tax cut plan was at least a little fairer, by freezing the alternative minimum tax that sweeps up more middle-income earners each year. To show where President Bush's heart is, however, the White House has threatened to veto the Senate bill not because it would cause pain for those who could least endure it, but because it also calls for a tax on the oil industry's outsized profits. (An add-on tax would ultimately hurt consumers more than the oil industry, but that isn't the most important point in this debate.)
At the end of the day, the Scrooge-like message is that Congress doesn't have the political will to really cut spending, or the moral courage to stand up to wealthy special interests lawmakers rely on for re-election. If they only had a heart.