Prometheus 6

In Fuzzy Math Fallout, Allan Sloan asks

Washington's cut-taxes-and-borrow crew are stalled in their quest for more tax reductions. Have years of using phony budget numbers finally caught up with them?

Only if people realize people who lie to you to get their way are not their friend. By way of pointing that out: 

Let's flash back to the heyday of tax cutting: 2001. You remember, we were supposedly going to have enormous federal budget surpluses as far as the eye can see. But instead of settling for large, straightforward, permanent tax cuts, Bush and his congressional allies used two kinds of "fuzzy math."

First, even though they intended the cuts to be permanent, they pretended that some of them would disappear, so the total would look good in whatever five- or 10-year budget window they were using.

Second, they minimized the cost of the cuts by shoving millions of ordinary taxpayers into the alternative minimum tax, which was originally designed to stop a handful of rich people from avoiding all taxes. They knew this was going to happen -- Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey talked about the tax cut-AMT interaction during the 2000 campaign.

But now, some of those chickens have come back to roost, as have some from the 2003 cut. The move to permanently eliminate the estate tax seems stalled. In a piece of phony math from 2001, this tax is scheduled to end in 2010 but resume in 2011. The Bushies could have gotten a large permanent cut in the estate tax -- but they insisted on total repeal, cooking the numbers to make it seem affordable.

And the strange thing is, we all said they didn't intend to repeal those wealth transfers when they first discussed them. Yet we pretended otherwise, discussed the budget as though Republicans actually meant what they said.