The President, a former baseball man, is fond of quoting the quotable Yogi Berra.  I was reminded of one of the Yankees Great’s often repeated assertions “it’s deja vu all over again” when the House of Representatives put President George W. Bush’s tax cut package on the fast track. 

Early in my career, I was a high school history teacher.  I taught my students just as I had learned, some things in history seem to run in 20-year cycles.  It was in 1981 that Ronald Reagan secured passage of his trickle-down economic proposal, which was a colossal mistake.  The March 2001 House vote in support of Bush’s tax package is a prime example of our history’s cyclical nature. 

It also signifies the return of politics over reason.  There is absolutely no sensible reason that Congress should be considering any tax cuts when we have not yet taken up the budget.  This action is one of the most asinine things I have witnessed in Washington.  And this is not my partisanship talking.  In fact, I voted against the Democrats substitution tax package just as I opposed the Bush plan. 

The numbers just don’t add up.  Both parties have stated their priorities are to protect Social Security, preserve Medicare, increase defense and education spending, also give the citizens a tax break.   How can we do all these things and pay down the national debt?

It is my belief that reducing the debt is the best tax cut we can give the American people.  Paying down the debt will reduce interest on mortgages, car loans, and credit card bills.  Taxpayers would realize greater financial gains by cutting mortgages just half a percentage point, than they would if they received a few hundred dollars in tax relief.  In addition, that financial gain would last over the duration of their mortgage, when a tax cut can change with the political winds. 

If tax cuts prevail and the surplus is squandered, our national debt will again skyrocket to the record $290 billion level it attained by the end of the former President Bush’s term.  The recession that accompanied that deficit will surely return as well.

I am not isolated in my criticism of considering a tax cut plan in a vacuum without first passing a budget.  In fact, President Reagan’s own Director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockton, acknowledged this scenario was the crux of their failure with trickle down economics.  After leaving the Reagan administration, Stockman was quoted in the Atlantic Monthly as saying “we didn’t add up all the numbers.  The numbers were moving on independent tracks.”