The Week.(continuing conroversy over President Bush's proposed tax cuts)(this and other topics are discussed)

Former president Clinton is moving to Harlem. There goes the neighborhood.

Critics of President Bush's tax cut have come up with a new talking point: If he were really interested in anything more than cutting taxes for the rich, he would have proposed to cut the payroll tax (which falls more heavily on the working poor). This is said to demonstrate Bush's hypocrisy. But the real hypocrisy here is on the part of the critics, and it is a many-splendored thing. 1) During two decades of rising payroll taxes, liberals have not proposed doing anything about them. 2) If Bush had proposed cutting the payroll tax, they would be yelling themselves hoarse saying he was endangering Social Security and Medicare, which the tax funds. 3) Bush has proposed cutting the payroll tax, in a manner of speaking, and liberals have reacted exactly as predicted. His Social Security plan would let workers get back two points of the tax so long as they invest the money. Liberals bitterly oppose this idea because it allegedly endangers Social Security. 4) Their implicit alternative? A massive increase in the payroll tax.

John McCain professed to be making his early, disruptive push for campaign-finance reform this year to help President Bush. McCain would supposedly vanquish all the special interests in Washington, thus clearing away obstacles to W.'s agenda. So what's his excuse for teaming up with Sen. Ted Kennedy to sponsor a patients' "bill of rights"? McCain's impulse to help apparently knows no bounds-since he's rumored to be cooking up a gun-control measure next. As for the patients' "bill of rights," if you leave aside the principled objection that the federal government should have no role in regulating health care, and the practical political objection that the McCain-Kennedy bill would help enrich trial lawyers, there is still the small matter that further regulation of the health-care market makes insurance more expensive, and therefore increases the ranks of the uninsured. So the patients' "bill of rights" will eventually provide the predicate for more "bipartisan" health-care legislation-sponsored, no doubt, by Democrats and a certain key Bush-administration ally from Arizona.

Remember that "opposition from U.S. allies" to national missile defense? In a classic demonstration of the efficacy of sheer resolve in politics, it is melting away in response to the Bush administration's determination to defend America from missile attack-arms-control pieties be damned. British foreign secretary Robin Cook says, "If [missile defense] means the U.S. feels more secure and therefore feels more able to assert itself in international areas of concern to us, we would regard that as a net gain in security." German foreign minister Joschka Fischer-last heard explaining why he beat a policeman as a young New Left thug-says that missile defense "above all is a national decision for the United States." All of this is in response to the Bush administration's words, which now need some follow-up. The only viable long-range system currently available to the U.S. is the limited one for deployment in Alaska that the Clinton administration had planned, then backed away from. Bush should immediately begin construction of that system's radar-the element that will take longest to build and on which the rest of the system depends-as the necessary first step toward a more extensive defense. If actions follow words, who knows? Maybe not just the allies, but even the Russians and Chinese will eventually get the message.

President Bush wants Head Start, the early-education program for poor children, to spend more time teaching tots to read. As part of that shift, the program would move from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Education. Bush's idea may be a good one. But it is hard to evaluate it honestly when nobody is willing to acknowledge the backdrop: Head Start has been a failure. No study has ever shown that children in Head Start, or similar "early intervention" programs, gain any lasting benefit from it. The New York Times, in a story on Bush's plan, reports that "few today question the program's value for poor children." Maybe they should start.

Virginia's car-tax repeal appears to have stalled. Even though Gov. Jim Gilmore-the new head of the Republican National Committee-won election in 1997 on the promise of ending the tax, which cost some drivers more than $1,000 per vehicle, there is a push under way in Richmond to retreat from the full phase-out promised by 2002. It's not as though the state is facing a financial crunch: Its budget has grown faster than those of all but four other states since Gilmore took office, outpacing population growth, inflation, and even personal-income growth. But northern-Virginia business interests want Gilmore and the Republicans to renege, and pay for more road construction instead. Gilmore is holding firm, but his legacy and the fate of the Virginia GOP are at stake.

The Rockefeller Drug Laws, enacted by New York State at the behest of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in 1973, were a symbol of national concern over drugs. Heroin, and addict-related crime, had been a plague in inner cities for decades, while other drugs had more recently ensnared the children of the middle class. Prohibition was already the national drug policy; the Rockefeller laws ratcheted up the punishments, making sentences mandatory and harsh. Four governors and 28 years later, Gov. George Pataki has proposed revising the Rockefeller laws, in response to another shift in public concern. Hard prohibition filled the courts and the jails, yet the array of drugs has increased, while drug use and drug crime, though they have diminished recently, are still higher than 1973 levels. Elite opinion now favors treatment over punishment for drug users. Milder drug laws would have their own consequences, not all of them painless: Drug use would inevitably go up, at least in the short run, and money saved on crime control would have to be spent on treatment programs. But the time for a long-overdue fresh look at our drug policies seems to have come.