George Will
George Will has more on the tax cut sunsets:
The sunset provisions serve the transparent fiction that the new cuts will deprive the government of no more than $350 billion over 10 years, the number that several deficit-phobic Republican senators insisted on. But given the success of Republican rhetoric - a success deriving from the public’s common sense - in arguing that allowing a tax cut to lapse is equivalent to increasing taxes, the sun will set on few, if any, of these cuts.So the 10-year cost to the government may exceed even the president’s original goal of $726 billion, which he supposedly “compromised” in half. Democrats, noting that Bush has achieved all this with almost no help from congressional Democrats and with little enthusiasm from the public, are probably muttering to themselves, as they have been muttering since election night 2000: It is a good thing George W. Bush is dumb as a stump or we’d really be in trouble.