Our opponents want more money from your family budget so they can spend it on the federal budget and make it remain high. We recognize loud and clear the surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money, and we ought to trust them with their own money. Thursday It's your money. That simple sentence explains the miraculous ability of two underestimated Republican presidents to win passage of the largest tax cuts in American history.
Words are the big battalions of politics.
And by distilling the conservative anti-tax argument down to four emotionally powerful syllables, Reagan and now Bush have left the Democrats sputtering in frustration. You would think that after 20 years, the Democrats would have come up with the perfect squelch, a politically persuasive response to GOP claims that big government wants to keep your money. Sure, the Democrats mounted counter-arguments against the Republican tax cuts. Delivering the Democratic response to Bush's speech to Congress in late February, Tom Daschle tried to summarize his party's case against the president's tax-cut plan. We want a significant tax cut this year.