Congress set expiration dates for President Bush's tax cuts in order to reduce their impact on the budget.

* Congress set expiration dates for President Bush's tax cuts in order to reduce their impact on the budget. From the beginning, liberals denounced the time limits as a phony maneuver to mask the tax cuts' true cost. Congress, they said, would never really let taxes jump back up. So far, however, Congress has not acted to make the tax cuts permanent or even to push back the expiration dates. The same liberals who keep insisting on the meaninglessness of those time limits are also demanding that they be left in place. Sometimes they do both things in the same op-ed. They have now added another complaint to the litany: Bush is supposedly hiding the budget impact of making the tax cuts permanent. He is putting the cost estimates in the fine print of his administration's reports. It is a trivial grievance. None of the tax cuts' critics have needed those costs to be on page one of an administration report to make an issue of them. If those costs are large, it is because allowing the tax cuts to expire would amount to a large tax increase-something the liberals do not acknowledge. Nor do they acknowledge that even if the tax cuts were made permanent, the average tax rate is scheduled to increase over time as economic growth pushes people into higher tax brackets. Making the tax cuts permanent would moderate that tendency and increase economic growth. Congress should do it, and let Bush's critics come up with a new inconsistent complaint.