At a time when President George Bush is threatening to veto a bill enjoying widespread bipartisan support that would increase money to fund health insurance for poor kids he is making it clear he’s no naysayer. He does have something he’s firmly for:
President Bush said yesterday that he is considering a fresh plan to cut tax rates for U.S. corporations to make them more competitive around the world, an initiative that could further inflame a battle with the Democratic Congress over spending and taxes and help define the remainder of his tenure.
Advisers presented Bush with a series of ideas to restructure corporate taxes, possibly eliminating narrowly targeted breaks to pay for a broader, across-the-board rate cut. In an interview with a small group of journalists afterward, Bush said he was “inclined” to send a corporate tax package to Congress, although he expressed uncertainty about its political viability
The president’s comments came as he tried to calm volatile stock and mortgage markets and reassure the country that the economy is fundamentally strong. Despite mounting concern over the downturn in the housing market, he dismissed proposals advanced by prominent Democrats to grant government-chartered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more freedom to buy mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. And he ruled out any taxpayer bailout of lenders threatened by the subprime home-loan crisis.
There is a common thread in all this. MORE:
In a 48-minute conversation on an array of economic issues, Bush also warned China not to start a trade war, blamed Congress for not doing more to shore up infrastructure such as the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last week, and pushed back against Democratic presidential candidates who are promising to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement
The basic thread is that Bush will simply not work with those who have a “D” in front of their party names. You can almost start copying “boilerplate” sentences from news stories and pasting them into whatever issue comes up. As he winds down his time in office, Bush remains one of the most non-compromising, polarizing Presidents in all of American history. If there’s a choice between consensus and confrontation, he’ll opt for confrontation every time. It’s all power politics.
The good news: there may be enough votes to override any veto on the children’s health care issue. Or will GOPers in the end, as usual, opt for the White House course?
UPDATE: As he beings to plant the seeds for a big push for more corporate tax cuts, it turns out that the President’s people have begun what Bill Scher notes is a “minformation campaign” about his stance on the children’s health care issue and what it does. In other words, the plan is being demonized and misrepresented.
Read his post and check out his links.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.