Treasury secretary John Snow did something Tuesday that would have cost him his job a year or two ago: he told the truth. When asked by Knight Ridder reporters if tax cuts paid for themselves, Snow responded that they didn’t, and “also acknowledged that economic growth and stock market gains were strong in the late 1990s, when the capital-gains tax stood at 20 percent and dividend income was taxed at rates as high as 38.6 percent.”
The next day, Bush signed tax-cut extensions into law and said they meant “more tax revenue for the federal Treasury.”
Job security in the Bush administration is mostly a matter of loyalty and avoiding indictment, but Snow’s consequence-free contradiction of the president’s dogma reflects two things: nobody listens to him any more, and nobody wants his job. It’s not unusual for Bush administration officials to contradict themselves or one another, but it usually happens only when political expediency dictates a change in course, as with DHS chief Michael Chertoff’s about-face on deploying National Guard troops to the Mexican border, and it rarely has anything to do with honest opinion.
Snow is far from alone in rejecting the supply-side argument that tax cuts generate more tax revenue than they lose: a legion of economists, including several high-profile former administration officials, say the same thing. Economist Brad deLong has the short course on the subject here, and former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich commented on the subject at his blog, here.
DeLong’s meditation focuses on former Bush chief economist Greg Mankiw, who can’t be fired from the administration because he already quit, and anyway does his best to make what he’s saying sound as though it supports the administration’s claims. Bush officials Lawrence Lindsay and Paul O’Neill, Snow’s predecessor, were both shown the door 
for uttering things that were more or less true— Lindsay for estimating the cost of an Iraq invasion at $50 billion or more at a time when the Pentagon was claiming the invasion would pay for itself, and O’Neill for advocating fiscal restraint and saying approximately what Snow did on Tuesday (and possibly for dancing in the jungle with Bono).
Colin Powell would have been fired, despite continually humiliating himself on Bush’s behalf and only occasionally, and obliquely, referencing reality if doing so weren’t guaranteed to precipitate a public relations crisis. Other reluctant warriors weren’t so much fired as they were disappeared, sometimes while they were still in office: does anyone even remember that Stephen Friedman replaced Lindsay?
Part of this is Bush’s fault. He, or whoever does his hiring, seems to delight in conscripting people, like Powell, O’Neill and Friedman, who aren’t natural allies, and then sending them out to sell policies with which they aren’t in whole-hearted agreement. But those three had queues of would-be replacements lining up behind them; Snow can look over his shoulder and see for miles. Barring an attack of conscience or someone accidentally telling him he’s doing a heck of a job — which at the moment consists mostly of asking Congress to raise the debt ceiling — he’s the safest man in Washington.
