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Editorials
Saturday, March 10, 2001Bush’s tax cut faces
surgery in the SenateThe issue: President Bush's tax cut proposal has been passed by the House but faces formidable opposition in the Senate.
THE best that can be said about the $958 billion tax cut proposed by President Bush and passed quickly by the House of Representatives is that the vote clears the decks for action in the Senate. A very different bill is likely to emerge from that body. And it will take time.
Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the upper house's tax-writing body, said it will be May before the committee starts working in earnest on its version of Bush's 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut package.
By that time, the House probably will have passed several other items in Bush's plan to add to the $958 billion cut that Republican leaders pushed through Thursday.
Candidates for the next measure for action include those addressing the "marriage penalty" paid by millions of two-income couples, doubling the $500 child tax credit, repealing the estate tax and expanding tax breaks for charitable contributions.
But no knowledgeable observer is under any illusion that the measure lowering income tax rates passed by the House Thursday will become law. The Senate is divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, and several moderate Republicans have already signaled that they do not trust the budget surplus projections on which the plan is based.
Many legislators and observers are confident that the president will be forced to compromise to get any measure enacted into law. Some say Bush is simply posturing and he is probably already preparing to compromise.
There will be pressure from both sides -- from those who want to cut taxes even more deeply than Bush proposes and those who reject his plan as too big and too generous to the rich.
The Democratic congressional leaders, Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, effectively dramatized the imbalance when they said a typical high-income person could buy a $46,000 Lexus with his savings under Bush's plan, while a low-income person could only buy a muffler. Of course, the high-income person pays much more in taxes, but the disparity in relief is enormous and hard to justify in view of the huge imbalance in incomes in this country.
There is good reason to be skeptical about the budget surplus projections, particularly in view of the current faltering of the economy. Moreover, Congress has been exceeding the spending ceilings on which the surpluses are premised. And by the time a tax cut is enacted it may come too late to offset the current economic situation.
Bush has a good line when he says the people have been overcharged and deserve a refund, but the facts are that those same people expect government to provide benefits beyond what it will be able to pay for.
With Medicare and Social Security funding in jeopardy, a more prudent approach to tax relief -- such as the plan proposed by the Democrats -- would be preferable. There is no need to go off the deep end on tax relief.
Mixed-race Census data
IN Hawaii, mixed-race marriages and multiracial offspring are no novelty. Few Hawaiians claim 100 percent Hawaiian blood and many aren't even 50 percent Hawaiian.
Now a picture of America is emerging that indicates a similar trend. The result could be changes in social policies to reflect a more complex -- and perhaps in time a more tolerant -- society.
The first official release of Census 2000 data showed that hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of the opportunity to identify themselves as members of more than one race.
The data, made available first to New Jersey, Mississippi, Virginia and Wisconsin, confirmed forecasts of explosive growth in the Asian and Hispanic population, especially in the biggest and fastest growing counties.
The release of the figures to the four states was the first in a series of reports for the states that the Census Bureau will make public throughout March.
The Associated Press pointed out that because of changes in federal guidelines for collecting statistics on race and ethnicity, Census 2000 was the first that allowed people to "mark one or more races." Consequently there are no direct comparisons for racial data between the 1990 census and the 2000 results.
Respondents in 1990 could select from only one of five categories: "white," "black," "American Indian, Eskimo or Aleutian," "Asian or Pacific Islander" and "some other race."
The 2000 census gave people the option of choosing from one of 63 race options, including "white," "black or African American," "American Indian and Alaska Native," "Asian," "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander" and "some other race."
In New Jersey, for instance, 480,276 people classified themselves as Asian only, but 44,080 people identified themselves as Asian and some other race.
A separate question asked people to identify themselves as "Hispanic" or "non-Hispanic." "Hispanic" is considered an ethnicity, not a race; people of Hispanic origin can be of any race.
WILLIAM Frey, a University of Michigan demographer, observed that the new classifications could instigate changes in social policy and be the focus of civil rights lawsuits. "There is a potential of a real blurring of the lines in racial identity," Frey said. These "numbers coming out are just the tip of the iceberg."
Now that the Census questions have been expanded, federal programs should reflect the complexity of racial issues when a growing number of Americans identify themselves as of more than one race.
Published by Liberty Newspapers Limited PartnershipRupert E. Phillips, CEO
Frank Bridgewater, Acting Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editor
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
