Smart bombs

It was entirely predictable that tax cuts would get the credit when the White House learned that the projected budget deficit for this year would be a surprisingly low $296 billion. And so there was President Bush this week announcing that “tax relief is working, the economy is growing, revenues are up, the deficit is down.”

Let’s backtrack a bit to gauge this confidence in tax cuts to attract gushers of tax dollars. The final deficit figure for 2005 was $318 billion. In February, the administration announced the bad news that the deficit would swell to $423 billion for 2006. Does that sound like folks who are certain of the revenue-producing powers of tax cuts?

So what explains this rhetorical turnaround?

A) The White House was just as surprised as everyone else that the deficit would be $296 billion.

B) The White House exaggerated the projection in February in the hopes that the final figure for 2006 would be portrayed by the media as tremendous progress.

Liberals like Ike. I spent some time at Spokane Falls Community College this week checking in on my 9-year-old son, who was attending Youth College. He loved the classes, but I can’t say I was impressed with the supervision of the kids as they walked – and sometimes wandered – from class to class.

Anyway, after chaperoning him to one class, I saw posted outside an instructor’s office door this truncated version of a passage in a letter President Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

This quote has been passed around in e-mails and is all over the Internet, with the part about Hunt removed to make it look more damning to President Bush.

Still, it’s pretty amusing coming from a Republican. You certainly don’t have to guess what his position would be on privatizing, er, establishing personal accounts for Social Security.

Stop truth decay. Judging from correspondence on last week’s item about chlorine, it seems the parody wasn’t transparent enough. For the record, I think chlorinating the drinking water is just fine. Sure beats dealing with E. coli and other bacteria.

I was just substituting “chlorine” for “fluoride” and making many of the same specious arguments the anti-fluoride forces make. Little did I know that people are afraid of tiny traces of chlorine, too.

In any event, thanks for the tips on filters.