Is it true?

Do we really have $1.3 trillion to give away?

President George W. Bush’s tax… Is it true?

Do we really have $1.3 trillion to give away?

President George W. Bush’s tax cut plan that was recently passed in the Senate is a wonderful example of the all too frequent political bag of potato chips designed to make you think that you are getting what you paid for. Just like the chips, when we open up the political bag, we will see that it is mostly air and a few crumbs.

Put every American in one room, and the average person will receive between $4,000 and $5,000 from this tax cut – about half a used car, a few months’ rent or a year of groceries.

Sounds good, but remember, that’s an average. Your panhandler friend to whom you give a dime when you go into a drugstore most likely will get nothing- he doesn’t pay taxes.

“Well fine,” you say. “A tax cut is for taxpayers.”

OK. Now let’s remember that we pay taxes on a sliding scale, so the more you earn, the more you pay, and vice versa. By its very nature, this tax cut gives more money to people who already have more money.

“You pay more, you get more,” you say.

Fine, that makes sense, but it is exactly the reason why this tax cut is very wasteful, essentially useless and completely sensationalized. It is a lot of money, and in the end, the people who need it aren’t getting it.

Do we really have $1.3 trillion to spend? If so, maybe we should look at some more options.

Tim Russert noted on “Meet the Press” last Sunday that it has been estimated that the AIDS epidemic in Africa, which long ago became disastrous, could be solved or at least curbed with $5 billion a year for the next five years.

Sounds like a lot of money until you realize that we have $1.3 trillion at our disposal. If we gave the $25 billion that has been estimated, the average American would be sacrificing $85. That’s a shirt, a pair of pants and a pair of underwear at the Gap. We would be left with $1.2975 trillion – not too shabby.

If Dwight Eisenhower taught the country anything by building the highway system in the 1950s instead of later, it was that a dollar now might be worth $5 or $10 down the road. Not only would our $85 per person save millions of lives, it might also save us from paying $250 billion in a decade or two, if or when we decide to take action against AIDS. But this assumes there will be someone left by then.

So we’ve spent $25 billion – now what? Why don’t we pay school teachers more? Or how about we build homes for the homeless? Or help Americans afford medications?

We could do all of those things and still have some spending cash left over.

Isn’t America supposed to be the free and visionary country? How can it justify a tax plan that is so confining and shortsighted?

If we chose to spend this surplus wisely, while it might not be as popular as saying “free checks for all,” it would not only be the smarter thing to do, it would be more beneficial.

If we could stop or curb the major problems in America and around the world today, we could do more than simply cover the problem with money. Bush would be using money as a tool to fix the problems now, saving us money later. Spending this money would help us more in day-to-day life than the average $4,000-$5,000 in tax cuts each person would receive.

A child can take money out of the piggy bank to pay for a broken window, but a carpenter rolls up his sleeves, gets out the tool box, buys the equipment and builds a window that won’t break again.

In the long run, who do we want to be?

Eric Lidji recently bought a huge box of Raisinettes only to discover that the box was nearly empty. You can console him at [email protected].