Urges Repeal of Middle Class Tax Relief

In a explicit rant, self-proclaimed "NeoCon" and foreign-born Editor for NewsWeek Fareed Zakaria calls out in a new column, "Raise My Taxes, Mr. President! We can’t afford the Bush cuts anymore." Zakaria even blamed the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the deficit.

The Bush tax cuts remain the single largest cause of America’s structural deficit—that is, the deficit not caused by the collapse in tax revenues when the economy goes into recession. The Bush administration inherited budget surpluses from the Clinton administration. What turned these into deficits, even before the recession? There were three fundamental new costs—the tax cuts, the prescription-drug bill, and post-9/11 security spending (including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars). Of these the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly half the cost of all legislation enacted from 2001 to 2007 can be attributed to the tax cuts.