There are two big problems with George W. Bush
as a wartime president: He's losing the war on
terror, and winning the war on work. He
shouldn't get away with either.
Americans know the war on terror will be a
long, hard struggle, and whatever our partisan differences, all
of us have been rooting for America to win it. But three years
after September 11, it's hard to tell which is more dangerous
-- that we're not making enough progress on terror, or
that Bush is so eager to declare victory.
In 2000, Bush promised to be a "reformer with results."
This time his motto seems to be "resolve without results."
Bush is a world-class cheerleader, but to win, our team needs
a better game plan and coach.
Ironically, losing ground in the war on terror and in Iraq
has spared Bush from having to defend the war on work he's
winning handily here at home.
For more than two centuries, under Democratic and
Republican presidents alike, America has aspired to be a
middle-class country that rewards hard work and sides with
those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Bush and
Dick Cheney want to change that. Their entire domestic
agenda is driven by one goal: to end the taxation of wealth,
and shift the whole tax burden onto work.
Bush and Cheney are halfway there. In 2001, they
repealed the estate tax and cut tax rates for the upper brackets.
They went on to preserve and protect those cuts, and
make them permanent, in the face of record deficits and a
war that could last as long and cost as much as the Cold
War.
In 2003, Republicans went further, with sharp cuts in the
tax rate on capital gains and dividends. If the 2001 cuts have
been a disaster for the nation's finances, the 2003 cuts were
an attack on the nation's soul.
As Warren Buffett, the great and very wealthy investor,
points out, we now tax ordinary people more on the work
they do than we tax billionaires on the stock profits they turn
or the wealth they inherit.
Soldiers, police officers, and firefighters pay a higher tax
rate for risking their lives every day than Halliburton executives
will pay for exercising their stock options. That's what
Bush Republicans call values.
Worse, their war on work is just beginning. Bush says
his top goal for a second term will be tax reform, and conservatives
make no secret about what reform will bring.
Grover Norquist, the Donald Rumsfeld of Bush's war on
work, wants to eliminate the capital
gains tax, the dividend tax, and the
corporate income tax. If
Republicans have their way, the
only thing America will still tax is
going to work for a living.
The middle class has already
taken a terrible beating on Bush's
watch. In the 1990s, incomes grew
for lower- and middle-class families,
not just for the wealthy. Under
Bush, middle-class incomes have dropped $1,500, and
poverty is going up while the middle class is shrinking.
Families are paying more for college, health care, and energy.
Employers must choose between dropping health coverage,
holding back raises, or laying people off instead of
hiring.
But the most lasting damage of Bush's agenda isn't the economic
squeeze that families are feeling now. The real price we
will pay is a moral one.
The war on work is not about the size of government or
the overall level of taxation. If Bush and Cheney cared about
that, they would try to limit government spending, not run
up enormous deficits that will cost the government and the
economy dearly down the road.
This debate isn't about an abiding faith in supply-side economics,
either. Bush has changed the rationale for his tax cuts
every year since he proposed them. He rushed to extend them
despite overwhelming evidence that confirms the lessons of
the '80s: These cuts don't work.
Bush isn't just ignoring the economic literature; he's going
against Scripture. "No one can serve two masters," says the
Book of Matthew. "You cannot serve God and wealth."
In the end, Bush's tax plan isn't an economic theory. It's a
social theory: Those at the top matter more than the rest of us.
For decades, Republicans accused Democrats of believing
that helping a particular class was more important than
expanding opportunity for all. Now Bush has made helping
one class his party's whole reason for existence.
That is not the American way. This country was built on
a different set of values: that all citizens are equal, that everyone
willing to work hard should have a chance to get ahead,
and that special privileges for the few stand in the way of
equal opportunity for all.
Those are the values at stake in this election. Bush is winning
a war he couldn't possibly defend, and defending a
war he's not winning. America deserves better than that.
