Sally Field? Not me!

Dick Cheney announced yesterday that making the tax cuts permanent would be a priority for the government, John Snow, the treasury secretary, confirmed that, and now the Wall Street Journal has endorsed those plans. In an editorial, they write:

[A]llow us to remind Republicans what happened last November: You won! Democrats said the nastiest things about your tax cuts, called you tools of the rich and stepchildren of Halliburton, and voters nonetheless chose . . . your tax cuts. Now is not the time to walk around like Sally Field asking whether they really do like you. They just told you they did.

And one reason is because the tax cuts at issue are precisely those that helped to lift the economy out of its doldrums after they passed in mid-2003. The quarterly GDP figures tell the tale. While the first round of Keynesian, phased-in Bush tax cuts in 2001 did little, round two focused on boosting the incentives that would invigorate the economy's animal spirits. We doubt Republicans would be sitting on larger House and Senate majorities if they hadn't passed those lower rates.