Rick Hertzberg bangs his head against the wall at the Bush Administration's sales pitch for its non-stimulus package. He quotes the Financial Times--<sarcasm>that left-wing partisan Democratic newspaper</sarcasm>--calling the Administration's claims "...obviously bogus..." and "...dishonest and... designed to prevent a proper discussion of the long-term fiscal costs and benefits..."

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town: ..."These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans," Bush said in Chicago. "Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money." The first of these claims, as the Financial Times editorialized the day after the speech, is "obviously bogus." The second is true, but only in the sense that it is also true that if Bill Gates happened to drop by a homeless shelter where a couple of nuns were serving soup to sixty down-and-outers dressed in rags, the average person in the room would have a net worth of a billion dollars. Average, yes; typical, no. A typical taxpayer?one right smack in the middle of the income range?will get a couple of hundred dollars. And a worker in the bottom twenty per cent will get next to nothing?at most, a dime or a quarter a week.

The Bloomberg financial news service performed the useful exercise of calculating what this latest Bush package would deliver to Bush himself. If his income this year is unchanged, he could get a windfall of as much as $44,500. Not bad?more, in fact, than the total income, before taxes, of a substantial majority of American families. Dick Cheney does even better. His tax break comes to $327,000?more than the before-tax income of ninety-eight per cent of his fellow-citizens. At the Presidential and Vice-Presidential level, it seems, there is no conflict of interest between public policy and private gain. The two are in perfect harmony.

The question naturally arises: Have these people no shame? Well, yes, they have a little. They don't say outright that they regard giving money to the rich as a worthy end in itself. They say that their goal is to create jobs. That's what Bush said in his speech, not once but two dozen times. There are better ways to do this. The various Democratic proposals for smaller, faster, temporary tax cuts aimed at people who actually need money would be one such way. A payroll-tax holiday would be better still, because the payroll tax is a direct tax on jobs and therefore on job creation. Even better would be for the government to buy things that people need, that are social goods, and that markets cannot provide unassisted?things like schools, cops, and hospitals. To provide economic stimulus, after all, the money has to be spent; and the surest way to guarantee that it will be spent is to spend it.

The notion that the elimination of income tax on dividends has something to do with stimulus is, to quote the Financial Times again, "dishonest and seems to be designed to prevent a proper discussion of the long-term fiscal costs and benefits." The proposal makes sense only as part of the Administration's apparently iron determination to shift the tax burden downward.