Jonathan Alter on "Let Them Eat Cake" economics:

SO WHEN, FOR instance, he says “this nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war,” people might begin to wonder whether he is telling the truth. They might wonder if the 13 percent state-college tuition hike in Maryland or the $1 billion state-tax increase in Ohio or the state Medicaid crisis now raging from coast to coast might have something to do with priorities in Washington. If Bush loses, it won’t be on yellowcake uranium but on “let them eat cake” economics.

Yes, the president acknowledges that the economic downturn might also have contributed something to the eye-popping $455 billion budget deficit announced last week, the largest ever. But God forbid he admits that his huge tax cuts are in any way relevant. That would risk saying something inconvenient and true. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that Bush’s tax cuts have cost the Treasury nearly three times as much as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, reconstruction after September 11 and homeland-security measures combined. Tax cuts = 9/11 + war x 3. And the numbers get much worse in the years ahead as baby boomers retire. In other words, even if the tax cuts help stimulate a modest recovery, we have dug ourselves a deep hole.

....Explaining all this politically is a “bank shot,” to use a billiards term. It requires trusting the voters with complexity. Will they see that their new $400 child credits are chump change compared with all the new fee hikes and service cuts? Will they understand that they’re paying more in state and local taxes so that a guy with a Jaguar putting up a McMansion down the block can pay less in federal taxes? Will they connect those 30 kids cramming their child’s classroom to decisions in faraway Washington?

It’s hard to tell, but the Democrats better try to develop that connective tissue. The reason I have not yet written off John Edwards is that he is quietly devoting his campaign to this theme. In New Hampshire last week, he raised Bush’s unfunded mandates in education: “The result is that your property taxes have to be raised, and that’s a huge mistake.”

President Bush is a regular guy who doesn’t care a whole lot about regular people. The first is a political asset; voters like his guyness. The second is his greatest vulnerability, and he offers more evidence for it almost every day. Remember how he promised last winter to get rid of a loophole that allows U.S. companies with homeland-security contracts to unpatriotically incorporate in Bermuda to avoid taxes? The loophole’s still there. Remember how he promised to expand national-service opportunities for patriotic young Americans by 50 percent? Last week—despite bipartisan action in the Senate—he still hadn’t lifted a finger in the House for a measly $100 million to keep AmeriCorps from being slashed by 40 percent, leaving kids untutored and after-school programs facing closure. Who is he for first? The question is not just if the president tells the truth but if the truth—finally—will be told about him.

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