Americans Wise Up to Bush Sellout : Taxes: President’s broken promise will drop a bipartisan whammy onto Joe Six-Pack.

With each passing day, the Bush Administration acts more and more like the beleaguered Ryzhkov government in the Soviet Union. Nikolai Ryzhkov is Mikhail Gorbachev’s prime minister whose economic plan has come under fire for proposing “business as usual” while the Soviet economy sinks into depression and famine. Russians, burned by this callousness, are calling for the government’s resignation.

Bush’s budget negotiators are showing the same insensitivity. As the U.S. economy sinks into recession, President Bush, his budget director Richard A. Darman and Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, together with Republican congressional leaders Bob Dole and Bob Michel, are engaged in a bidding game with Democrats to see who can pile the most onerous new taxes on the voters.

The budget deal that Bush is cutting with Congress is an agreement that lets political incumbents of both parties spend more money in an effort to buy their reelection. Recently, Bush allowed Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and others who oppose the bipartisan sellout of the taxpayers to be excluded from the negotiations. The group now includes only those who are determined to raise taxes.

Americans are no less fed up with government than Russians. Washington insiders should take note of John Silber’s primary victory over the Massachusetts political Establishment and of the limited terms Oklahoma voters placed on state officeholders last week. Our politicians should also note the polls that show a jump in the number of low- and middle-incomeAmericans who believe that hard work no longer guarantees success because local, state and federal taxes steal most of the income gains that people achieve.

The U.S. government has a budget of $1.3 trillion, a sum that exceeds the gross national products of both France and Great Britain. If the U.S. budget were a country, it would be the fifth-largest economy in the world. Yet the greedy politicians want still more. Appealing to class warfare, they claim to be taxing the rich, but the rich are too few to produce much money. That’s why taxes always hit Joe Six-Pack. President Bush and Senate leader George Mitchell want to tax his beer, his cigarettes and his gasoline. Not content with this, budget negotiators want to undermine his job with massive surtaxes on entrepreneurial income. Everyone whose success creates jobs for others is to be hit with a 20% surtax.

This is no way to invigorate a declining economy. The last time taxes were raised in a recession, the result was a lengthy depression that created a market for more government.

The income surtax proposal is a conscious attempt to overturn the Reagan tax-rate reductions. The politicians know that sooner or later big money will result from inflation pushing Joe Six-Pack into surtax brackets.

The proposal to take away the federal deduction for state and local taxes is aimed at homeowners. It would further weaken a declining real estate market and raise the cost to taxpayers of the S&L; bailout.

Not satisfied with wrecking the private economy, the budget negotiators want to destroy the nonprofit sector by taking away the charitable deduction. This proposal is aimed at the only institutions in our society that still work--private schools, hospitals and museums, charities that feed and house the homeless, and nonprofit research organizations. The proposal would not raise any revenues--but that is not its purpose. The budget negotiators intend to greatly expand the education and welfare bureaucracies by eliminating the efficient private competition. If there are no alternatives to government programs, incumbents can spend still more money.

By violating his “no new taxes” pledge, the President is putting himself and his government in the same league with fraudulent S&L; operators. The American people bought his candidacy in an election based on his financial promise, just as investors bought S&L; bonds based on the representations of S&L; managements. How can Charles Keating be tried for S&L; fraud when our political leaders behave the same way? A financial lie told in politics is no less damning than one told in business.

When President Richard Nixon lied to the American people, he was forced to resign. President Bush should be held to the same standard. If Russians can demand the resignation of a government that puts its interest before those of the people, so can Americans.