Thomas Daschle: “the administration's Council of Economic Advisers will issue today some self-serving economic revisionism--a little like…”

“the administration's Council of Economic Advisers will issue today some self-serving economic revisionism--a little like a figure skating judge awarding the gold medal to his own team. We are going to hear that the recession was somehow shorter and shallower than it would have been without last year's mammoth, surplus- swallowing tax cut. Let me just say, I might like to change economic history, too, if I had just blown a $5.6 trillion surplus in less than a year. But let's set the historical record straight. The administration's proposed 10-year tax cut, when they offered it last year, was $1.7 trillion, plus about $300 billion in interest-- about $2 trillion. Of that, there was zero stimulative tax cut. Not a dime was to go out to the American people in the year 2001, last year. Let me restate that. There was no economic stimulus in the $2 trillion tax cut that the administration originally sent to Congress. Democrats who were concerned about the recession were the ones who proposed to give working American families immediate tax relief to get the economy going again. Our Republican colleagues, as late as last week, were arguing that there is no stimulative impact at all to rebates for working Americans. But now we have the White House Council of Economic Advisers suffering a case of convenient economic amnesia.…”