The one promise Obama will live to regret

I suppose he had to do it. Republicans have made a fetish of it, Walter Mondale proved the perils of defying it, and the electorate has come to expect it.

It's near impossible -- perhaps even absolutely impossible -- to advance in American politics without paying homage to it.

But Barack Obama will someday rue his pledge to cut taxes. Again. And this time, for "95 percent of American workers."

More cuts into our fiscal fabric are "part and parcel of what we need when it comes to stimulus," repeated the president-elect last week as he rolled out his team of economic commandos. The other part, or parcel, is of course the spending side -- a hefty package approaching a trillion dollars (or so it's reported) to land toot sweet on the new president's desk.

There's virtually no serious dispute coming from any political corner about the necessity of upcoming federal outlays. When consumers aren't spending and businesses aren't investing and banks aren't loaning, somebody needs to prime the pump, and that somebody is, naturally, through the logical process of elimination, the federal government.

Nor is there any serious dispute as to the need for the objects of that spending. Our roads and bridges and other infrastructure have finally ceased waiting for attention and care, state budgets and all their attendant services are gasping for aid, the vicissitudes of oil prices and superior dangers of global warming demand a sizable R&D into green energy -- and so on and so on; the backlog of inevitable investments is growing by the hour, their impoverishment having accumulated for so many years.

Additional spending in the hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, when it's all said and done, awaits Mr. Obama. And again, there's very little argument about it -- surprisingly little, given the already gargantuan debt he'll inherit.

No regrets. Not now, not later. Not when it comes to spending, especially when government is the spender of last resort and the ultimate cost of federal miserliness is several times the short-term tab. Obama can, should, and indeed will spend with Keynesian abandon, just as circumstances demand and twentieth-century American history and econ textbooks recommend.

And in time we shall, undoubtedly, in our own MacArthurian way, overcome.

But you know what? When that time comes, those tax cuts will still be in place. Put aside momentarily that the deficit and national debt will have grown monstrously worse as a result of the cuts: It's proper that we all be good Keynesians and accept that sort of thing. Consider it accepted.

The politics, however, cannot be excised from the economics of it.

Like your penurious brother-in-law, tax cuts have a way of hanging around long after their welcome or potential usefulness has expired. Once they're on the books, they're damn near impossible to expunge -- the most recent example of which is the almost certainly cancelled early retirement of George W. Bush's plutocratic cuts.

It even makes little difference that those cuts were fraudulently sunsetted at birth. Everyone knew that when the time of their scheduled lapse arrived, thunderous Republican cries of "Tax increase!" would be heard throughout the land. There they go again, the GOP would say of the Dems, raising taxes again, just like we always said they would.

The same will be said of any temporary income tax cuts for the middle class as well as payroll cuts for the lower. There is simply no denying it: These things have a way of becoming a permanent fixture of our fiscal imprudence.

If there were dependable evidence that Obama's suggested cuts would help turn the economy around, then, of course, the probably imprudent would be elevated instead to pure genius. Yet I've seen no such evidence -- indeed, the entire middle-class tax-cut proposal appears to dwell only in the risky realm of an absolute crap shoot.

In fact, while I confess the anecdotal nature of this observation, many if not most economists seem to believe that most of the middle class' fun money will be saved, not spent, essentially negating its urgent purpose.

Yet in two years or five we'll still be enjoying those stubbornly in-place cuts in an economy improved mostly by federal spending, not revenue forgiveness. So the government will continue to die its slow death of fiscal starvation, even as its stimulus and Baby-Boomer encumbrances have skyrocketed.

And by then, I'd wager, Obama will be haunted every moment by four little words: What was I thinking?