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MEET THE SUGAR BEET SOCIALIST AND THE CORNHUSK COMMUNITARIAN

April 04, 2008

Steven Pearlstein, the Washington Post business columnist, is unimpressed by the tax proposals we discussed yesterday from Senators Grassley and Baucus:

Hold on to your wallets, Mr. and Mrs. America, Max and Chuck are at it again.

Yes, our favorite sugar beet socialist and cornhusk communitarian have decided to ride to the rescue of the nation's troubled housing sector.

I think Max is the socialist and Chuck is the communitarian.

It all started on Monday when members of the Senate returned to Washington after another two-week recess in which they apparently discovered that voters actually expected them to do something about the housing crisis rather than just talking about it until the next recess. So Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Finance Committee, took the opportunity to dust off a quartet of stinky tax breaks that had been rejected by the House and the Bush administration back in February, when Congress was scrambling to show that it was doing something about the gathering recession.

The voters? Not me. Maybe this one.

Might there be another reason, besides pressure from deadbeats voters, for this bill?

All this will do little to solve the housing crisis, but it may help to alleviate the campaign funding crisis created when these same tax provisions were jettisoned from the economic stimulus bill. The angry and ham-handed response from Brian Catalde, the president of the National Association of Home Builders, was to very publicly announce the indefinite cutoff of all contributions to federal candidates. Were those same provisions to be enacted now, it would be a stunning acknowledgement by members of Congress of the direct connection between political money and legislative outcomes.

A connection between political money and legislative outcomes? I feel so disillusioned.

UPDATE: From Tax Vox:

To be fair, there are some useful nuggets in the bill. More honest closing documents for buyers may help, so would modernizing the antiquated and horribly inefficient FHA program. But these proposals are vastly outweighed by the truly awful tax provisions. This is being touted as a rare instance where Senate Democrats and Republicans are working together on a bill. Maybe partisanship isn't so bad after all.

It always seems that when the Democrat and Republican politicians come together, it's to gang up on the rest of us.

Tags: tax policy.

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