Moment of truth

It would be comforting to dream that Iraq is the only place where President Bush is creating a horrendous mess.

But it just ain’t so. With the president’s latest budget, we are reminded that we have another big problem on our hands.

Try to wrap your mind around these priorities. He would slash subsidies that allow states to provide health insurance for working poor families. He would cut spending on education, job training and veterans’ health care. Environmental programs would take some of the deepest cuts. A food program that provides meals to 400,000 poor elderly people would be eliminated. And so on.

All this is happening for one reason – to protect the tax cuts that provide an average of $162,000 a year to families earning more than $1 million.

You can only come up with a budget like this if you bury yourself in the White House basement and listen exclusively to like-minded ideologues. Each year they leave us deeper in debt. Each year they widen the gulf between rich and poor. And now they are offering us more of the same. Call it the budget surge.

The new twist is that Democrats control Congress now. And that is where this story gets interesting. Now we’ll see if Democrats have the gumption to take a political risk and change course by voting to repeal the tax cuts for the wealthiest families.

“I think we’ll make a run at it,” says Rep. Rob Andrews, D-N.J., who sits on the Budget Committee. “This is really the first test of the Democratic majority’s integrity on fiscal issues.”

The politics will be tricky. President Bush is likely to veto any move to repeal these tax cuts, and Democrats don’t have enough votes to override him. If a standoff leads to a government shutdown, as in 1995, it’s not clear which side would be forced to yield.

The sums of money at stake are enormous. Andrews calculates that reversing the tax cuts on the top 5 percent would yield $1.5 trillion over the next decade, enough to restore all these cuts, and make a healthy start at eliminating the deficit.

“It’s pretty simple,” he says. “You won’t have money for things like education, homeland security and veterans if you don’t repeal some of the tax cuts.”

The top priority for most Democrats is health care. In Trenton, New Jersey, state Sen. Joe Vitale for years has led efforts to expand coverage for the working poor, and he’s drafting a plan now to provide universal coverage in his state. Bush’s budget, he says, would explode that effort in a flash.

What’s striking is that Democrats don’t seem at all scared about being branded as tax-and-spend liberals. They all say they want to preserve the tax cuts for at least 95 percent of families. But they believe middle-class families understand that it’s the wealthy, not them, who have done exceedingly well during the Bush years.

This is a debate we need to have. The real question is whether Democrats are ready for the fight.