White House pounds Mitch McConnell as deficit fraud #p2

source http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/09/white_house_pounces_on_mcconne.html?wprss=plum-line

Dems think the war over the Bush tax cuts is a political winner for them because it lets them paint Republicans as stooges of the rich, but there's another reason they like this fight: It gives them a weapon to use against Republican pieties about the deficit.

Case in point: Today the White House opened up a new front in the war over the tax cuts, pounding Mitch McConnell as a deficit fraud over a new report saying his aides have only been able to come up with a way to pay for $300 billion of the $4 trillion cost of the GOP plan to make all the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Today's Post reported that the GOP plan to make the cuts permanent would cost more than $4 trillion and nearly double the deficit over the next 10 years. When the Post asked McConnell aides how they would pay for this, the aides noted that McConnell has backed a spending freeze that would save only $300 billion -- which the paper noted is "drop in the bucket compared with his $4 trillion-plus plan."

In a sign of just how intense this battle has become, the White House immediately circulated talking points on the Hill and to outside allies instructing them to hammer McConnell over the new report:

* Today's Washington Post provides further evidence that the Republican Party, after turning a record surplus under President Clinton into record deficits, still cannot be trusted to come up with a serious solution to control spending and reduce the nation's deficit. Instead, the only thing they're willing to offer are the same failed economic policies that created the mess we're in.

* Outlining Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's tax plan, the paper finds that his call to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for America's millionaires and billionaires would nearly double the projected deficit by adding $4 trillion to it over the next decade. And they're pretending that they would pay for it through a projected spending freeze, that fails to mention what they would freeze or cut, and that would only save $300 billion over that same period of time....

* Unfortunately, this lack of seriousness shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone...Are these really the people we want to put in charge of our economy?

The problem for the White House and Dems, of course, is that an uncomfortably high number of people have begun answering Yes to that last question. And some polls show more trust in the GOP on the deficit.

The battle over whether to extend all the Bush tax cuts, as the GOP wants to do, is a gimme for Dems because it allows them to draw a direct link between today's GOP and Bush's economic policies -- even as it gives Dems a way to paint the GOP as fundamentally unserious about deficits and about the economy overall.