Editorials

Political promises of all kinds are made by candidates during an election year, and 2008 certainly has been no exception.

Experienced voters have learned not to expect many of those promises to be fulfilled, even if those making them are elected.

They also have learned that it often is better if they are not delivered as promised.

Promising government goodies is easy, said Stuart M. Butler, a domestic policies expert at The Heritage Foundation. Paying for them is hard — especially on the taxpayers.

In the current campaign, liberals have discovered a source of inexhaustible funding for all of their promised new programs, Butler noted. It is called “Rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the rich.”

“Apparently it can pay for, well, everything,” Butler said.

For example, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, says just rolling back the Bush tax cuts would pay for expanding health insurance coverage. The same source has been tagged to plug the funding hole for Social Security, fix aging infrastructure and even cutting taxes for the middle class.

To those on the left, Butler added, “the Bush tax cuts for the rich” are the golden goose that keeps on laying. “But just like that goose, it’s a myth.”

Repealing the part of the 2001 and 2003 tax cut stimulus packages that eased taxes on wealthier Americans, while retaining breaks for other households, actually could generate billions in new government revenue, Butler concedes.

It comes to about $50 billion in each of the next two years.

“That’s serious money,” he said, “enough to, say, fund extended health coverage for two years without adding to the deficit.”

But there is a catch.

“The goose stops laying in two years,” Butler pointed out. “The tax cut is already set to expire after 2010. After that, the IRS starts soaking the rich again. Moreover the proceeds from that soaking are already figured into those gloomy, long-term spending and deficit forecasts. In other words, it’s already spoken for.”

The rollback crowd tries to counter such logic with some creative schemes.

They acknowledge the Bush tax cuts already are scheduled to roll back, but say we should assume Congress will act to restore the cuts once they expire and then the restored cuts can be repealed to generate billions in “new” revenue.

These people can’t really be serious.

The Congressional Budget Office offers some rationality in stating the simple truth: “Rolling back the Bush tax cuts” does not generate new money after 2010 because they were never projected to exist past then.

CBO projects that raising federal income tax rates to just pay for current programs would require all rates to nearly double over the next 40 years. Adding new expensive programs is “not economically feasible,” the CBO contends.

Voters ought to be searching frantically for candidates who will concentrate on trying to get federal government out of some of its current problems rather than promising new programs that would create new ones.

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