I hate welfare!

The 94% of welfare that goes to rich corporations, that is. (oil companies,
drug companies, halliburton, etc.)

I have no problem with the tiny 6% of total welfare that goes to the poor,
regardless of whether they can work or not, 6% is a splinter and 94% is a
huge tree.

Insanity, said Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again
but expecting different results. By this measure, the latest Bush tax cuts
qualify as certifiably insane.

Where have we seen this deranged fiscal strategy before? Remember Ronald
Reagan and Supply Side Economics? In the early 1980s, Reagan promised the
nation that if we lowered tax rates on the wealthy, the economy would grow
so much the federal budget would be balanced "within three years, maybe even
two."

Sober people were skeptical-and rightly so. Reagan's Republican opponent for
the 1980 presidential election, George H.W. Bush called it "voodoo
economics." His own Budget Director, David Stockman, called it a "Trojan
horse," a scam intended really to funnel more money to the already rich.
Stockman was quickly dismissed.

The results, we now know, were a disaster. In 1982, the first full year
after the tax cuts were enacted, the economy actually shrank 2.2%, the worst
performance since the Great Depression. And the effect on the federal budget
was catastrophic.

Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit
was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time
the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual
deficit of $290 billion per year.

Yearly deficits, of course, add up to national debt. When Reagan took
office, the national debt stood at $994 billion. When Bush left office, it
had reached $4.3 trillion. In other words, the national debt had taken 200
years to reach $1 trillion. Reagan's Supply Side experiment quadrupled it in
the next 12 years.

Is there anything to compare this to? When Bill Clinton took office he
intentionally reversed the Supply Side formula, raising taxes on the wealthy
and reducing them on the lowest wage earners. Supply Side true believers
predicted the arrival of the Apocalypse. Bob Dole said the stock market
would collapse. Newt Gingrich said the world would fall into another Great
Depression.
What actually happened?

Between 1992 and 2000, the U.S. economy produced the longest sustained
economic expansion in U.S. history. It created more than 18 million new
jobs, the highest level of job creation ever recorded. Inflation fell to
2.5% per year compared to the 4.7% average over the prior 12 years.

Real interest rates fell by over 40% producing the greatest housing boom
ever. Overall economic growth averaged 4.0% per year compared to 2.8%
average growth over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush administrations. Most
impressively, Clinton reversed the mammoth deficits of the Supply Side
years, turning them into surpluses. He used these surpluses to begin paying
down the national debt.

By virtually every meaningful measure-employment, growth, inflation,
interest rates, investment, deficits and debt-the economy performed better
once the Supply Side experiment was terminated and replaced with a more
honest economic policy where we actually pay our bills as we go.

This might all be ancient history if the spectre of Supply Side economics
had not reared its ugly head again once Bush II took office. In selling his
$1.6 trillion tax cut-half of which went to the wealthiest 1% of
Americans-Bush promised in 2001 that it would produce 800,000 new jobs. In
fact, the economy has lost 2.7 million jobs since Bush took office, again,
the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.

The effects of Bush's tax cut on the deficit and debt are exactly what we
would expect having seen Reagan's results-only worse. Bush inherited from
Clinton a fiscal surplus of $127 billion. In his first year he turned that
into a deficit of $158 billion. In this, his second year, he will run a
deficit of over $400 billion-a swing to the worse of over $600 billion in
only two years.

Now Bush has sold us on still another megadose of this same Supply Side
voodoo. Two thirds of his new $350 billion tax cut will go to the top 10% of
income earners. Bush's Congressional ally, Tom DeLay, promises more such
cuts for every year Bush is in office.

The long term effects of these policies are profoundly damaging. When Bush
took office, the government's ten year surplus was forecast to total $5.6
trillion. This was critical to building fiscal soundness as the Baby Boomers
begin to retire.

Now, the ten year forecast projects a cumulative deficit of $1.1 trillion, a
net loss of $6.7 trillion in only two years. With the exception of World
Wars, this is the greatest, most rapid destruction of public wealth in the
history of the world.