From today's
WaPo, demonstrating GOP congressional fiscal discipline:
- THE CORPORATE tax bill that Congress has sent to the White House rewards just about every special interest that retains a lobbyist in Washington. Makers of sonar fish finders stand to gain, as do importers of Chinese ceiling fans, dog-track operators who cater to foreign gamblers, and Native Alaskan whaling captains.
***
A few years ago, congressional Republicans claimed to stand for free-market principles -- for the idea that government should get out of the way and allow the economy to reward the innovators and entrepreneurs who fuel progress. But power has corrupted the party. Now that they are the incumbents, they skew the economic playing field so as to reward their friends and fill their campaign treasuries.
The bill that Congress has produced is monstrous in just about every way. Designed to close a $5 billion-a-year export subsidy that violated international trade law, it ended by spraying out $140 billion in business breaks over 10 years. It absurdly rewards tobacco farmers, and absentee tobacco landlords, without imposing even the minimal regulation on tobacco that the nation's biggest cigarette maker had agreed to. In Friday's debate, President Bush said he would discipline Congress in order to reduce the budget deficit. If Mr. Bush cannot bring himself to veto this terrible bill, it will be hard to take him seriously.
OK, GOPers. Your candidate, somewhat improbably, ridicules the credibility of his opponent on fiscal matters while remaining curiously silent on the double digit increases in non-defense-related spending on his watch, and his apparent loss of his veto pen, lying somewhere in uncleared brush in Crawford.
Anyone think he'll veto this? Slave, you still think he'll find his pen sometime after Election Day?
