Four more years!?!?! 7 high hopes and 7 big fears for Bush's second term

Reason, Feb, 2005

John Berthoud is president of the National Taxpayers Union (www.ntu. org).

I Hope ... We'll Keep Taxes Down by Eliminating Corporate Welfare and Entitlements for the Rich

Tyler Cowen

COMMENTATORS FREQUENTLY refer to the Bush "tax cuts," but this is a misnomer. Government spending has risen sharply, so our taxes are going up in the future, especially once you consider the implicit liabilities from Social Security and Medicare. Bush has given us a "tax shift," combined with a long-run net tax increase. We simply haven't yet been told which taxes are going up and when.

To keep American taxes at reasonable levels I would eliminate all farm subsidies, tariffs, quotas, and price supports, along with other forms of corporate welfare. More important, I would repeal the Medicare prescription drug bill, slowly raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare, and introduce means testing for benefits.

Tyler Cowen (www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler) is all economics professor at George Mason University, director of the Fames Buchanan Center and the Mercatus Center, and author of the forthcoming Markets and Cultural Voices (University of Michigan Press).

I Fear ... Deficit Worries Will Bring Tax Increases

Grover Norquist

THE ONE MISTAKE that could cripple a second Bush term is to accept the campaign promise to "cut the deficit in half in four years" as a central goal of the administration. The deficit is an uninteresting and unimportant number that is the difference between two very important numbers: total federal government spending, and total federal taxes.

The true cost of government and the correct target is total federal spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product. To reduce government spending as a percentage of the economy, Republicans should first cut taxes to increase economic growth and then restrain the growth of federal spending below the growth of the economy. Democrats cannot compete on a political field of battle dominated by pro-growth tax cuts and spending restraint; they are against both and have no alternatives.

But if the ghost of Dick Darman wafts through the White House and convinces the administration to focus on the deficit, then tax cuts are a problem, not half the solution, and Democrats have an equally valid solution: raise taxes.

A fixation on the federal deficit--rather than spending as a percentage of the economy destroyed the presidency of the first Bush. I fear it could happen again.

Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform (atr.org).

I Hope ... We'll Hear More About Ownership

Charles Murray

EVEN THOUGH GEORGE Bush has no commitment to limited government, the right rhetoric can have a power of its own. The task is to come up with a proposition that a large proportion of the electorate will hear and instinctively say, "Damn right." For years, libertarians haven't had one. We have tried to reinfuse words like freedom and rights with the power they once had, but they have become too degraded by overuse. Ownership may still have that power. To say that the money we spend on Social Security is for our own retirement and that we ought to have ownership over it sounds to me like the Damn Right proposition that could catalyze a political majority.