Said I, " . . . -Most of Gore's tax cuts are conditional. Why should -you have to do something the Gov wants you to do to -get a tax cut, in light of $260 billion surpluses. -Bush's are much less so, albeit to the wrong people.
Pronounceth Nathan, "Conditional tax cuts" is another word for government spending. All government spending is conditional- ie. it tells you we are giving you health care coverage rather than letting you spend the same money on a big screen television. What a bizarro Republican line you want to take Max to keep calling Gore's spending conservative. . . . "
WRONG! Soc Sec benefits aren't conditional. Neither is any other cash transfer, of which there are a number. You can spend them on whatever you like, like big screen televisions, or even one a' them fancy flat screen you put on the ceiling over your bed. Revenue sharing wasn't conditional. Personal\ exemptions aren't conditional. Etc. etc.
The components of Gore's plan are not all 'conservative.' The fiscal framework is ridiculously so.
Apparently we are defining liberalism here as some narrowly pitched benefit that makes the tax code more complicated, often going to someone who would have performed the subsidized activity in any case. This is the sort of thing that gives it a bad name.
But it can only help me politically to be called a bizarro republican, so heap it on.
Here's an hypothesis. Discuss amongst yourselves:
what progressives need are large, simple proposals for transparent, redistributive cash transfer programs for broadly popular purposes (i.e., working families with children, young people just starting out their careers, higher ed, or business enterprises. Not narrowly targeted, means-tested fiscally constipated, numerous programs entailing high levels of bureaucratic overhead.
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But let's look at the $10,000 Gore projects for this family with two small
children. This family is decribed this way: "A couple from Michigan has two
children ages 2 and 4. The husband earns $24,700 as a short-order cook.
The wife works full-time at the corner supermarket and earns the minimum
wage. They have two children, a 2 year old in childcare and a 4 year old
who has just started preschool. They are saving $10 every week for a down
payment on a home."
Marriage Penalty Relief $225
Child / Childcare Tax Credit $600
Tax Credit for Savings $500
EITC Expansion $303
Minimum Wage Increase $2,000
Expanding Health Coverage $3,400
Qualified Universal Pre-School $2,400
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I'm not sure what the point of this is. If you tailor an exemplary family you can find $10K of benefits. But all the others who don't fit don't see the $10K.
Reject liberalism and try social democracy: Big, expensive universal programs serving broad purposes that eliminate boundaries within the working class.
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Most of the $10,000 in new federal spending Gore projects is not even for
tax cuts in any way, but is rather for health care spending and the
expansion of federal spending for universal pre-school, with a large minimum
wage kicker.
Wanting "more" is always a good position for progressives to demand, but it
seems quite strange to call conservative a set of programs that would
increase federal resources going to this family at a rate 50% above their
present income. You are so fixated on the hypothetical anti-Keynesianism of
his nominal budgeting projections that you seem to ignore the real
projections of substantive expansions of spending by the government.
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[mbs] Resources to your example family (I expect they'll be sitting next to Tipper during the SOTU address) are not a very useful criterion for evaluating Gore. A better one would be distributional effect, but that's hard to do. Another would be total cost of programs pitched to families below the median, and that's easy to do.
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It is reasonable to argue whether the plan will be implemented, but on its
face, this seems like a quite progressive spending plan, especially since
the benefits are skewed proportionately towards lower-income families, a
radical difference from Bush's plan which does deliver nearly all the
benefits to the richest folks. -- Nathan Newman
see above.
mbs