The policies once blasted by the president's father have become the centerpiece of the current administration's economic policy.
Arianna Huffington, Salon, September 5, 2002 http://www.salon.com/news/col/huff/2002/09/05/voodoo/index.html
Like a lung cancer patient reaching for a pack of smokes, the Bush administration has greeted the latest run of gloomy economic news -- Tuesday's stock market plunge, a ballooning federal deficit, flagging consumer confidence, mounting unemployment, not to mention those pictures of Dennis Kozlowski literally wrapping himself in the flag in his yacht over Labor Day -- with a nerve-settling puff of its favorite brand of economic relief: tax cuts for the rich. And considering the imprudence of that idea, maybe they're smoking something a little stronger than Marlboros.
According to the White House, the proposals being considered include tax incentives to encourage stock market investment and capital gains tax cuts -- on top, of course, of the massive impending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans already signed into law. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill defined the party line this way earlier this summer: "This is how we create economic prosperity -- not by strangling people with interference and regulation and punishing restrictions on trade and job creation, but by opening the world up."
In other words, meet the new new economy, same as the old new economy. Forget the inconvenient fact that deregulation hasn't worked -- that it's given us an airline industry on the verge of collapse, higher electric and cable bills, a savings and loan disaster, to say nothing of Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, AOL, Xerox, Merrill Lynch, et al. -- the invisible hand is still the magical answer to all our woes.
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