I was amused but not surprised to see the Students for Bush trot out the same old conservative lies in Matt Nash's April 13 article "Kerry returns for town hall meeting."

Marquette Students for Bush Chair Daniel Suhr said that Kerry's tax plan would be bad for small businesses and the economic "recovery." I would ask first, what recovery? He trotted out the March job report as "proof" of the success of Bush's tax policies. Well, it turns out that the 308,000 "new" jobs were not new jobs at all, but a result of Southern California grocery workers ending their strike. Even with those jobs, Bush is still over 2 million jobs in the hole despite the fact that the 6-month recession was over almost two-and-a-half years ago.

The "Misery Index" shows the middle class to be worse off: Unemployment continues to increase; real wages for both the lower and middle class have decreased; at the federal level, tax revenues are down, while deficits, the debt and the trade imbalance are at record highs and still increasing, with no decreases in sight. This despite the first round of tax cuts having occured in July of 2001.

What Suhr says about Kerry's plan is the same thing conservatives were saying about President Bill Clinton's 1993 Deficit Reduction Act, which raised the top tax rate and which itself led to the largest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history creating 22 million new jobs. This isn't surprising, since the economic data show that overall, raising the top tax rate raises the economic growth rate, while lowering it has an overall negative effect, according to a March 3, 2003 report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. As for small businesses, apparently Suhr didn't bother to actually look at Kerry's tax plan, which would lower taxes for companies that don't go offshore (i.e. those very same small businesses).

I would recommend that in the future Suhr actually do some research (and thinking) rather than mindlessly quote from the Bush-Cheney 2004 Web site. But to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he's done the research, in which case he's simply a liar.

Rostov is a political writer.

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