Mr. Bush goes to Washington

Social justice news
April 2001

Catholic Relief Services web site brings in donations, award
Catholics call for an end to embryonic stem cell research
JustFaith joins the Catholic Charities family
Movieland's war on drugs could have real-world influence
Mr. Bush goes to Washington: a presidential track record
Rediscovering women's work in church history
We're not just skin and bones anymore

Mr. Bush goes to Washington: a presidential track record
Despite losing the popular vote and gaining the White House only after the intervention of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, President George W. Bush has aggressively pursued generally conservative positions he staked out during his campaign and has not shied away from controversial decisions during his first months in office. Much of the legislation signed or endorsed and executive orders issued during the infancy of this new presidency has not exactly endeared Bush to America's labor and environmental community, nor to budget hawks of any political persuasion.

Below is a brief rundown of some of the president's major positions and actions so far:

Bush becomes labor's pain?
In his first few months in office, Bush signed legislation to repeal union- backed workplace safety rules, intervened to stop a mechanics' strike at Northwest Airlines, issued an executive order ending a preference for unionized companies in many federally financed building projects, and issued another order intended to make it harder for unions to use their members' dues for political activities. Some AFL-CIO leaders view these decisions as payback for big labor's support of Al Gore.

The repeal of the "ergonomics" rules had been at the top of the agenda for many Washington business lobbies. The rules, ten years in the making, were created during the Clinton administration and were aimed at eliminating injury from repetitive motion stress. Business leaders suggested the new regulations would have cost as much as $4.5 billion to implement. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration estimated that the new ergonomic standards would have prevented 460,000 injuries annually and saved businesses as much as $9.1 billion a year in worker compensation costs.

After signing the bill repealing the ergonomic standards, Bush issued a statement: "The safety and health of our nation's workforce is a priority for my administration . . . Together, we will pursue a comprehensive approach to ergonomics that addresses the concerns surrounding the ergonomics rule repealed today." Those more business-friendly, perhaps voluntary ergonomic standards are likely to take months, even years, to establish.

The president has said he supports an increase in the minimum wage but has not indicated how large an increase he supports. More troubling to labor leaders, however, is his call for states to have the authority to establish different "minimum" wages in order to attract business and jobs. They fear a race to the bottom of the wage scale within the U.S. similar to the ongoing globalization-driven depression of wages.

For more information
AFL-CIO's Bushwatch
OSHA's ergonomics page
Executive orders

Energy and the environment
While Bush is only the latest American president who can be accused of having no long term strategy for U.S. energy production and allocation, his call for opening up new fields of oil exploration and production in Alaskan nature preserves in response to the California energy crisis has been criticized as especially disingenuous short-term thinking. Most of the electric supplies that reach California are produced by natural gas, not oil, critics point out, and any exploration in Alaska is not likely to produce fossil fuel supplies for years—hardly an answer to California's immediate energy crunch—while potentially endangering some of the last wilderness lands in North America.

As New York becomes the next state scrambling to avoid an energy meltdown this summer, Bush administration officials can only worry that California is beginning another entirely less groovy national trend.

Among the short-term fixes being considered before this summer of energy discontent begins are:

• Firing up emergency generators at military bases and other federal facilities to lessen their strain on the power grid.
• Encouraging malls, factories, and other power hogs to install their own mini-power plants—fuel cells or microturbines, reducing their consumption from the grid during peak times.
• Pressuring the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to require Western power sellers to refund any "unjust and unreasonable" profits. Businesses oppose this idea, while consumer groups champion it.
• Ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to ease limits on smog pollutants.
• Allowing the restart of mothballed nuclear-power plants.

Other recent environmental decisions have been even more controversial. The Sierra Club blasted Bush's decision to ignore changes in water-quality standards aimed at reducing arsenic levels in drinking water and on March 28, the Bush administration abruptly announced the withdrawal of the United States from the 1996 Kyoto Protocol, an effort to seek a coordinated international response to the problem of global warming. Candidate Bush had expressed some doubt as to whether or not the phenomenon of global warming truly existed, and if it did, whether or not it represented a threat.

His decision to formally abandon Kyoto follows the U.S. Congress' refusal to ratify the treaty, which would have called for substantial reductions in greenhouse gases produced in the United States. By some estimates, with just 6 percent of the total world population, the US is responsible for producing 25 percent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions. Bush administration officials have said improving the economy has become their number one priority.

Bush's announcement infuriated European and Japanese allies, even drawing the energetic condemnation of Great Britain, an ally that had seemed almost congenitally incapable of criticizing the U.S.

For more information:
"Arsenic and Old Laws"—from the New York Times (registration may be required)
US blow to Kyoto hopes—from the BBC

Taxing proposals
On the campaign trail, candidate Bush pushed his 10-year $1.6 trillion tax "reform" despite national polls that indicated most Americans were more interested in using any national surplus to pay off the nearly $5.7 trillion national debt. President Bush has maintained this focus on "tax relief."

Bush has been criticized for using the faltering economy as a rationalization for his tax package, thereby worsening the nation's current downturn, according to some analysts. Others worry that the restructuring of the tax code that Bush proposes is being built upon on dubious surplus projections. Should those surpluses not materialize, say critics, it may be politically impossible to restructure the tax code to respond to future conditions.

The Bush plan includes across-the-board tax cuts, reducing the lowest rate from 15 to 10 percent while lowering the top rate from 38 to 33 percent. It also calls for a phase out of estate taxes, a move that reduces tax revenue, according to critics, without providing a substantial benefit to few but the nation's top wealth holders.

Lobbyists for small businesses and farmers argue, however, that the estate tax should be eliminated since paying it can often mean the loss of family farms and businesses, sold or parceled off to pay off the tax. Establishing some mechanism of relief for these groups has support in both parties. These so-called death taxes currently apply to estates larger than $675,000. The measure to eliminate the 85-year-old tax may cost as much as $186 billion over the next 10 years in lost tax revenue.

The Bush plan also calls for doubling the per child tax credit from $500 to $1,000. The package moved swiftly through the House of Representatives but has met more sustained resistance in the Senate where budget hawks from both sides of the aisle have found much to be unhappy about at the same time a sudden downturn in U.S. financial markets has threatened the viability of the entire package.

Democrats charge that the lion share of Bush's ten-year plan will favor the wealthiest Americans and have offered a counterproposal that includes a $300 "tax rebate" meant to provide a near-term economic stimulus without substantially tinkering with existing tax rates and reserving a greater share of any surplus for debt reduction. Other proposals have called for the creation of an "automatic off switch," meant to reverse rate cuts if federal surpluses don't appear as advertised and the nation is threatened with the return of deficit spending.

When accountants at Deloitte & Touche did some number crunching for the Christian Science Monitor, they reviewed the impact of the Bush proposals on the effective tax rate, that is, the burden of all federal taxes on specific tax brackets. They discovered that the nation's "very rich," or top 2 percent of tax payers, would benefit the most from the Bush proposal. Over five years a married couple filing jointly earning more than $700,000 a year would save an average $46,000 a year, or an overall effective tax rate reduction of 5 percent. By comparison, a married couple filing jointly earning $60,000 a year would average a cut of only $1,800, or a 1.7 percent reduction in effective tax rates. Those results support critics of the Bush package who charge that it primarily helps those who have already enjoyed the lion's share of the nation's recent economic good fortune while doing little for tax payers whose incomes have stagnated or even declined during the recent "boom."—KC

For more information:
Office of Management and Budget
Congressional Budget Office
Senate Budget Committee
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Democratic counter proposal
"Has Bush doomed his tax cut?"—Salon

Back to page top