New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalt - 01:01pm May 30, 2001 EST (#4345 of 4466)

We are dealing, now, with concerns about a presidential administration more serious than any before in history. I was concerned, before the election, that the Bush administration was a Nazi inspired conspiracy, that embodied all that was evil, illegal, and dishonorable in the Cold War, and in the usages of the military-industrial complex -- in essence, a "vast- right wing conspiracy" willing to subvert the values Americans are most proud of. I can only say that, after having watched some of the detailed actions of the administration, I can only continue to be concerned, and think all Americans, especially honorable Republicans, and everyone else in the world interested in safety, should be concerned.

The New York Times is, in the main, a careful, conservative paper -- not interested in departing too far from the values of the elite readers it serves, and the advertisers it serves.

The following articles, in the OpEd section of the paper, indicate a degree of concern about basics that seems, so far as I can tell, to have no precident in American history.

May 27, 2001 The Big Lie by PAUL KRUGMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/opinion/27KRUG.html

> " " ...................... there's a growing body of evidence that the usual rules don't apply to this administration.

. . . . .

" So how did the conferees manage to preserve almost the whole Bush tax cut despite a budget resolution that should have forced a substantially smaller cut? They lied.

" Throughout the selling of this tax cut, its advocates have engaged in a disinformation campaign unprecedented in the history of U.S. economic policy — misrepresenting who would benefit from the plan (pretending that a tax cut mainly for the rich is actually aimed at the middle class) and understating its effects on revenue. Indeed, the pretense that taxes can be sharply cut without undermining the fiscal integrity of the nation has been maintained via financial fakery that, if practiced by the executives of any publicly traded company, would have landed them in jail.

" Still, the fraud perpetrated late Friday night takes fiscal chicanery to a completely new level.

" To understand what went down, you need to realize that Congress makes 10-year budgets, which are supposed to include consistent projections of revenues and outlays over the next decade — in this case, through the end of 2011. There's a lot wrong with that 10-year horizon. It encourages fiscal scams, like backloading tax breaks so that their true cost is hidden in the out-years; this final tax bill will surely reduce revenue by well over $4 trillion in its second decade. And the 10-year horizon is especially damaging at a time when the main fiscal concern of the federal government ought to be how to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits to the baby boom generation, which will start to retire — guess what — 11 years from now.

" But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the tax cutters would engage in Friday's final scam.

" Here's what they did: they made the tax bill fit within the budget resolution by assuming that the whole tax cut will expire at the end of 2010. That is, they simply waved their hands and made all the revenue that will actually be lost in the last year of the 10-year period — hundreds of billions of dollars — disappear from the accounting. One of my Capitol Hill contacts calls this "the miracle of the loaves and fishes."

" Need I point out that absolutely nobody who supports this tax bill thinks of it as a temporary measure, to be canceled at the end of nine years? This is white-collar crime, pure and simple. We should call in the Securities and Exchange Commission, and send the whole crew — Democrats like Senator John Breaux and Senator Max Baucus as well as their Republican partners in crime — to a minimum-security installation somewhere unpleasant.

(121 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense