A predictable vote.

Byline: The Register-Guard

With the election just over a month away, Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that their Democratic rivals can be manipulated with astounding ease. All that's needed is a cleverly timed vote on middle-class tax cuts.

Republican leaders correctly predicted that Democrats, including presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, would rather eat bees than be painted as tax hikers six weeks from Election Day. Besides, the tax breaks for married couples, families with children and taxpayers in the lowest-10-percent bracket were among the most popular and sensible elements of President Bush's 2001 tax cuts.

Unlike Bush's outlandish tax rebates to millionaires, there is widespread support for programs that ease the tax burden on the middle class. But the Bush administration and its cronies in Congress have made it clear that they have no intention of approaching even sensible tax relief with responsible fiscal discipline.

When they were introduced, the middle-class tax cuts were touted as temporary in order to reduce the cost of the $350 billion tax cut in 2003. But they were cynically crafted to expire during an election year, when it would be political suicide for most members of Congress to oppose an extension.

The recent vote to extend the middle-class tax cuts will cost $146 billion. Congress hasn't got the money, and Bush refused to approve any plan designed to finance the cuts by closing corporate tax loopholes or limiting the time period of the extension.

The result is that this money, like all the rest of the funding for Bush's irresponsible tax cuts, will have to be borrowed now, piled on top of an already record deficit and ultimately repaid by the children of the people receiving the tax relief.

Apart from the president's inability to pay for it, the most maddening aspect of this so-called middle-class tax cut is that even it is skewed toward the top 20 percent of income earners, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. The real middle bracket of U.S. incomes - the 20 percent of households in the center - will pocket an average of $169 in tax savings next year. Households in the top 20 percent of incomes will get an average of $1,196, and those with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000 will get back an average of $2,172.

The Bush administration and Congress are counting on the fact that the billions and billions in mounting U.S. debt - increasingly held by foreign banks - is too abstract for most people to grasp. But $169, now that's real money.

The only problem is the final bill for that $169 isn't going to arrive for another 10 years or so. And when it does, those taxpayers won't be able to hold the responsible parties accountable.