Wed, Oct 10, 2001 page19

• Not everything has changed in Washington

  Politicians have not taken long to align their cause with fighting terrorism in the hope of profiting from the issue

  • By Andrew Ferguson / BLOOMBERG
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  Even before the bombs began falling Sunday, it had become cliche to note that "everything had changed" -- that our political priorities in particular had been forever re-ordered by the attacks of Sept. 11. What's remarkable to those of us who follow every yip and yap of political debate, however, is how much remains the same.

  Consider the case of poor Terry Everett. For nearly a decade now, the Republican Congressman from Alabama's peanut-farming country has loyally slopped the folks back home with subsidies and price supports, never attracting unwanted publicity and -- this is crucial -- keeping peanut prices artificially high.

  And then suddenly, without warning, he becomes a figure of fun on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

  It all began last Tuesday, when The Washington Post quoted a letter Everett sent to colleagues promoting the Farm Security Act in general and peanut subsidies in particular. Everett's letter opens with a dramatic headline: "US farm policy -- it's about security."

  How so? "America's abundance of safe and affordable food and fiber," Everett wrote, "should never be taken for granted." "Keep America strong," he went on, "Support the bipartisan Farm Security Act." Even by congressional standards, Everett's letter veered toward self-parody, conflating our efforts to fight terrorism with our urgent need to subsidize peanut farmers and bulk up on dietary fiber. The next day the Journal editorialists had a high time mocking him.

  Which was amusing enough till your eye wandered from the editorial to the column next to it -- a plea, by supply-side swami Arthur Laffer for a cut in the capital-gains tax as a response to terrorism. It wasn't quite as silly as Everett's letter. But close.

  Referring to the Sept. 11 attacks, Laffer wrote that "by far the most dramatic damage done to America was in the stock market." I hate to quibble, but isn't the annihilation of two 100-plus-story buildings and the instantaneous murder of nearly 6,000 people even more dramatic than a drop in the Dow? Never mind. Laffer is an economist. Terrorism makes him think of tax rates

  To return to normalcy, Laffer wrote, the nation requires "an immediate cut in the federal capital-gains tax rate to 10 percent from 20 percent. Second best would be to allow dividends to be tax deductible to businesses." Yes, Osama, you may break our bodies, you may bring down our buildings, but you will never deter us from our mission to abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax.

  Terrorism's effect on the political class -- that unsightly scrum of publicists, special pleaders and politicians, along with the commentators who nip around their ankles -- has been rather more ambiguous. Where most people see unutterable devastation, these folks see a chance to enact, once and for all, their favorite policies.

  The tastelessness afflicts Democrats and Republicans in equal measure. On National Public Radio the other night, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a longtime opponent of the welfare reform of 1996, proposed reversing important elements of the reform as a "wartime measure."

  Another liberal columnist, Matt Miller, announced that the attacks had made it painfully clear that we must pass national health insurance.

  Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, for his part, is busy resurrecting a pet piece of legislation against money laundering. When he promoted it as a blow against drug traffickers, the bill sank. After Sept. 11, it was suddenly reborn as an anti-terrorism measure, and its chances of passage are much improved.

  Levin follows the example of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who included in his anti-terrorism package ideas that had earlier been declared indispensable to the war on drugs. Congress rejected them. Recast as weapons in the war on terrorism, many will now be approved. Just as ingeniously, Robert Zoellick, the US Trade Representative, argues for presidential "fast track" trade-negotiating authority as a response to terrorism.

  My favorite example of this overreaching comes from the Cato Institute, which has long opposed Kyoto-style regulations to fight global warming. The reason used to be that the regulations were bad for business; now they're bad for war.

  "It's time to back off on things like Kyoto and regulations that have the potential to tie our hands in any way," writes an uncharacteristically bellicose Cato commentator. "Halfhearted war efforts are for losers."

  Now, many of these ideas are perfectly sound. Laffer's tax cut is fine with me; all tax cuts are fine with me. Cato's right on Kyoto. Surely Zoellick is correct in his passion for free trade, and maybe even correct that free trade would mitigate against future terrorism. It's possible that Reich is correct too; there's a first time for everything.

  But we don't have to drag terrorism into it; we don't have to trivialize the horrors of Sept. 11 by using them to bolster an argument we were going to make anyway, whether the horrors had occurred or not. Farm subsidies and capital gains, fast track and global warming are all issues that can be debated on their own merits.

  After all, there's only one kind of meaningful response to terrorism -- the kind that's lighting up the night sky over Kabul this week. The rest, as even Congressman Everett might admit, is just peanuts.
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