“Strategic deficit’ is ploy to cut programs
David Stockman used the term to describe Reagan’s tax cuts,
but Bush seems bent on same starvation tactics
By William Raspberry June 9, 2003

  Washington - Sometimes Democrats do manage to find their' voices.
  They sang together loudly enough last week that the Republican-led Senate agreed to modify the president's $350 billion tax-cut package to ensure that minimum-wage workers will get the same child tax credit as other families.
    Many of the working poor were eliminated from the credit in the original package because  they don't pay enough income taxes to claim the entire $1,000 benefit. Thanks to last Thursday's agreement making the benefit a refundable credit -- low-income families will, get the same rebate as other families later this summer -- about $400 per child.
  It was never wholly partisan, of course. Some Republicans have long favored refundable tax credits, and many others were embarrassed over the class-warfare aspects of the administration's tax maneuvering. But in the absence of substantial Democratic opposition, most Republicans found it easy to go along with their leadership.
  It would have been awkward enough if the elimination of certain poor families from the benefits of the credit had been an oversight or, as with the so-called marriage penalty, the result of other ostensibly reasonable provisions. Unfortunately, it was deliberate - done at the last minute to help pay for some of the breaks intended for the well-to-do.
  That, despite last week's fix, is what makes this little dust-up so ominous. The president has made tax cuts the heart of his economic policy - sometimes on the ground that the government is taking too much of our money, sometimes on the ground that tax reductions will produce more government revenue.
  For a truer understanding of what he may actually have in mind, it may be helpful to go back to the Reagan administration's "supply side" approach (which the current president's father once, dismissed 'as "voodoo economics"). As Reagan's budget director, David Stockman,  later acknowledged, the real intent of the Reagan tax cuts was to produce a "strategic deficit that would give you an argument for cutting back the programs that weren't desired."
  Trying to kill the programs directly wouldn't work, the, reasoning went. After all, every federal program exists because it has a constituency willing to fight for it. But suppose there simply wasn't the money to pay for all the programs. Then constituencies would have to decide among themselves which to cut and which to keep.
  And if legislators insisted on keeping more than the budget would allow, then they - and not the tax-cutting president would be branded as fiscally irresponsible budget busters.
  That, so far as I can tell, is pretty much what's happening now.
  What is ostensibly a fight over how best to jump-start the U.S. economy is, at a deeper level, a fight over the nature of government's basic duty: to help the helpless and provide a certain level of comfort and, security for everyone: or only to protect us against the common foe, leaving the rest to the legerdemain of the free market.
  The Bush administration is waging the war indirectly -- by seeking to starve the government out of a broader role, at least as regards the poor.
  The well-off, on the other hand continue to have their comfort and security assured. The bulk of the newly enacted tax cuts clearly favor the wealthy.
  The elimination of estate taxes -- billed as protection for the struggling farm family -- is in reality about allowing rich families to keep their riches. Even the new rules promulgated by the Federal communications Commission will make it easier for big media operators to concentrate their power -- and their money.
  The entire administration seems to be singing out of the Billie Holiday songbook: "Them that's got shall get; them that's not shall lose."
  I suppose you could count me among "them that's got." I'll do OK under the Bush approach. But a lot of Americans -millions of them children - will not, and someone' ought to be thinking about them, too.
  Maybe it's time for a new songbook. -

William Raspberry is a Pulitzer Prizewinning social issues columnist for The Washington Post, Write to him at willrasp@washpost.com.