Mother Jones Daily: Briefing

POLITICS
Tax Cut Trickery

President Bush signed his massive, $350 million tax cut into law last week, and, though smaller than originally proposed, the bill is a GOP victory by any measure. As the days pass, some of the bill's nastier provisions are coming to light.

In a last-minute decision, Republicans excluded millions of low-income families from a $400 increase in the child tax credit. As UPI columnist Cynthia Tucker points out, however, the working poor are exactly the people who need such credits the most.

"In other words, that child tax credit will not go to those who need it most. (Families earning less than $10,500 a year were not eligible for the tax credits because they pay no federal income taxes.) It was a deeply cynical maneuver.

Let's be clear: The families denied the child tax credit work for a living. Still, they barely earn enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. It's difficult to pay the bills when you earn little more than $5.15 an hour."

In its defense of the eleventh-hour cut, the White House contradicted its standard -- albeit unconvincing -- argument that the tax cut will stimulate the economy. "That tax break was among the few provisions in the gargantuan tax-cut bill that even resembled economic stimulus, since working families are more likely than the rich to spend the money right away on necessities," Tucker adds.

And if poor families didn't make out so well in the bill, multinational corporations had plenty to celebrate. Despite the high-profile corporate scandals that dominated the headlines for much of 2002, House Republicans discarded measures that would have prevented corporations from using Enron-style accounting tricks and moving their headquarters to post office boxes in offshore tax havens. As the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman reports, corporations and their hired hands in the Capitol couldn't help but gloat a bit over the victory.

"'The things that mattered most were all the things that didn't get in,' said a Republican tax lobbyist. 'That kind of stuff really matters.'"

SUV manufacturers and owners did well for themselves, too. The tax credit for buying a gigantic SUV -- a Hummer, say, or Chevy Suburban -- was quadrupled to $100,000. It won't just benefit the owners of Mom and Pop construction companies, either: the language is so broadly written that virtually anyone can claim the tax break. And as the editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer observe, the provision is so outrageous that no one has dared take credit for it yet.

Meanwhile, the ghost of fired Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and his impolitic (read: truthful) pronouncements haunted the proceedings. A study commissioned by O'Neill showed a mind-boggling $44 trillion gap in future federal revenue as Baby Boomers hit their senior years. Numbers like that, of course, don't make the argument for tax cuts any easier. So, as the Financial Times' Peronet Despeignes reports, the White House simply buried the conclusions. Not surprisingly, some Treasury staffers are frustrated.

"'When we were conducting the study, my impression was that it was slated to appear [in the Budget]. At some point, the momentum builds and you think everything is a go, and then the decision came down that we weren't part of the prospective budget.'"

ENVIRONMENT
Further Endangered Species

It's no secret that the Bush Administration has found several insidious ways to rescind environmental protection laws. Now, the latest argument of Bush and Co. professes that the Endangered Species Act is "broken," reports Guy Gugliotta of the Washington Post. Under the staggeringly eco-conscious tutelage of George W., the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service seeks to weaken the 1973 Act. The ESA, which is charged with listing threatened species and protecting them by maintaining their habitats, may be weakened due to Interior Department claims that the Act has lost its effectiveness. Instead of asking for increases in funding, the administration hopes to extend the settlement of lost lawsuits and redefine the Act's integral definition of "critical habitat." Supporters of the Interior Department's plan accuse the Act of creating lawsuits instead of protecting endangered animals.

Environmentalists scoff at the accusations, retorting that the Bush administration's plans to cut back on protection for species and their habitats will only result in more lawsuits. J.R. Pegg of Environment News Service writes that the environmentalists believe the administration has "engineered a funding crisis as part of a broad agenda to rollback protection for endangered species to benefit oil, gas, timber and mining interests." Bush's previous clandestine efforts to cripple the Act have created an alliance of watchful skeptics within the environmental movement -- especially since the president routinely capitalizes on the American public's calls for heightened National Security as a means to weaken environmental protection.

Pegg reports that a rider on the 2004 military spending bill would have given the Secretary of the Interior ultimate jurisdiction over the designation of critical habitat for endangered species. Furthermore, he writes, the Bush administration is the only presidency that has never independently designated a species' critical habitat. Bush cares for critters only when forced by court order to do so. And finally, California Democratic Congressman San Farr writes in the San Francisco Chronicle (via Tom Paine.com), the House's May 22nd vote to release the Defense Department from the standards set by the ESA and its counter-part, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, has shown that the military is always the fallback excuse to ravage the American landscape. Farr censured his colleagues for approving a long-term solution to a temporary problem. It's not as though the military doesn't usually win out over the environment anyway, Farr's statement notes:

"What the military is not telling us is that it has the ability to request -- and has always received -- waivers on a case-by-case basis."

Well then. If that's the case, why NOT just retract environmental protection altogether? It would probably cut back on those pesky lawsuits.