By Ann McLane Kuster

I support permanent middle class tax relief instead of extending Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Apparently that position is enough to prompt an accusation of “economic illiteracy” from this newspaper.  And to be fair, my opponents in both parties - from Katrina Swett to Congressman Bass - cheered on the Bush tax cuts when they passed.

But I’d rather help change Washington than continue the same broken policies that got our economy into this mess.  So, let’s look at four key questions to decide who is right:

1) Is it fair to describe Bush’s tax cuts as “the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans”?  Well, in New Hampshire, 36.2% of the benefits went to the top 1% of income-earners (who make an average of $1.2 million a year).

2) Did the cuts go to the middle class as well?  Some did, but not enough.  The typical New Hampshire taxpayer, who earns roughly $50,000, saved about $700 on his or her tax bill because of the Bush tax cuts.         

3) Did these tax cuts help our economy or hurt it?  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that if the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are made permanent, they will be the single biggest cause of deficits in this country over the next decade - bigger than the stimulus, the bailout, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, all combined.

Meanwhile, when Bush’s main package of tax cuts passed in March of 2001, the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.3%.   In every one of the 112 months since, unemployment has been higher than that.  Unemployment peaked at 10% last year.   I don’t blame George Bush’s policies alone for every one of those lost jobs, but that record is a devastating verdict on the central piece of his economic policy.

4) Were the tax cuts the main cause of the recession?  Of course not.  The market crash resulted from a perfect storm of misguided policies.  Chief among them was the deregulation of Wall Street, when Congressman Bass and his Washington colleagues repealed market safeguards that had been in place since the Great Depression.

Sensible people can disagree on what the correct answers to these four questions are.  That’s why we have elections.

Here is what I believe: America tried the Bush-Cheney approach to government for eight long years and it didn’t work.    

Instead of tax cuts that were targeted to the very wealthiest, we should have passed broad middle-class tax relief, kept the deficit under control, and invested in the job creation that was missing over most of the last decade.

Instead of the war in Iraq, we should have kept our eye on counter-terrorism in Afghanistan, prevented the need for the current Afghanistan escalation in the first place, and saved thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

We cannot afford to go back to the misguided policies of the past.

Frankly, this isn’t a partisan debate.  My opponent in the Democratic primary, Katrina Swett, supported the Bush tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and now the escalation in Afghanistan.  And while I am proud to have widespread support from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, I am equally proud that so many Independents and open-minded Republicans are already standing with me in this campaign.  They recognize that the reckless spending of politicians like Congressman Bass made a mockery of the fiscal restraint for which the Republican Party  was supposed to stand.

We can do better. We must do better.  We must help change Washington, not go back to the failed policies of the past.

If that belief earns me some name-calling from the defenders of George Bush’s policies, so be it.

 This opinion column appeared in the Tuesday, August 10 edition of the Union Leader but did not appear online.