Bad Goodies

As Sen. John F. Kerry pointedly reminded voters on Friday during the second presidential debate, President Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill in his nearly four years in office. Lavish tax cuts are not the only reason the federal deficit is stuck in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The absence of a veto threat gives lawmakers no reason to restrain themselves.

The corporate tax bill passed by the Senate on Monday and sent to the president for his near-automatic signature is a good example. The bill, as originally intended, gets rid of a subsidy to U.S. exporters ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization and closes a few corporate loopholes and tax shelters. But instead of contributing the $50 billion in savings to the federal kitty, lawmakers larded the bill with new corporate welfare. The package could cost taxpayers an additional $80 billion over 10 years, according to the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Maybe, as supporters argue, a cut in manufacturers’ tax rate would create new jobs. But there’s no proof that waves of preceding tax cuts did much in that regard.

The breaks go to businesses ranging from the oil and gas industry to NASCAR race track owners to bow-and-arrow makers. Most inexcusably, tobacco farmers long protected from foreign competition will receive a separate $10-billion handout. On paper, the bill isn’t supposed to cost the Treasury anything. That would be true only if all of the provisions in the bill that are supposed to expire before 2014 aren’t extended, an extreme unlikelihood given recent tax cut history.

What could have been a trade-policy adjustment that saved the taxpayers a little money is now a package of corporate goodies thrown on top of the debt pile. Bush, by never carrying out a spending veto, helped make it so.