This is from the lead front-page news article in today's New York Times: "The speed with which the Republicans are trying to ram through the rate reductions, without any talk of compromise, has alienated conservative Democrats who might have been ready to respond to Mr. Bush's calls for bipartisan compromise."
That description of "speed" and the lack of compromise is the New York Times news department talking; the opinions aren't attributed to anyone else. And it's just warped. The rate-reductions under the plan passed by a House committee last week would not go into full effect until 2006. Mr. Bush has been talking about his tax plan since he was campaigning in the Republican primaries last year. That's speed?
As for compromise, the death-tax relief has already been stripped from the Bush plan now under consideration by Congress; as the Times article itself points out, the income tax rate reductions account for only about $1 trillion of the $1.6 trillion the tax cut is estimated to cost using the government's flawed, mostly static analysis of the effects of the tax cuts on government revenue. There's no "talk of compromise" because the Republicans have already compromised by cutting loose $600 billion worth of tax cuts and by not putting the full rate reductions in effect until 2006.
And for all the talk about conservative Democrats being "alienated," the Times manages to write this entire article under the headline "Bush Pushes Hard To Woo Democrats Over to Tax Plan" without mentioning one Democrat that Mr. Bush has already won over, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia.
To get a real sense of where the New York Times is coming from on the question of tax cuts, check out the piece that runs on today's op-ed page. It starts out lulling readers into thinking it favors the Bush plan: "President Bush's planned tax reduction is not excessively large or tipped outrageously toward the well off."
But read on, and you find out that the opinion piece actually advocates reducing the top tax rate by only a paltry three percentage points, to 36.5 percent from the current 39.5 percent. That is still far above the 28% top rate that President Reagan managed to get through a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, and it is higher than the 31 percent rate that President Bush acceded to when he broke his "read my lips" pledge. The piece also argues for retaining the death tax, arguing that keeping the tax in place means that "The families of Bill Gates and his Silicon Valley colleagues can still feel noble about giving up some of their enormous wealth." The desire to induce a feeling of nobility is not much of a justification for a mandatory tax; if the billionaires want to feel noble, nothing is stopping them from giving their money away to charity voluntarily. There's nothing particularly noble about complying with the law.
Lost in D.C.: A sidebar to today's front-page New York Times article on "Medicine Merchants" reports that "A wing of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington bears the name of Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, who died in 1987." This makes it sound like the Smithsonian Institution is one big building and the Sackler is a wing of it. In fact, the Sackler Galley is a freestanding museum or division or part of the Smithsonian.