Bush says cuts in taxes working

President Bush said yesterday the tax cuts he signed into law have already set the country on the path to economic growth if Congress controls spending.

“We feel like the tax-relief plans that we have passed will be robust enough to create the conditions necessary for economic growth, and therefore, people will find a job,” Mr. Bush told reporters after gathering with his top economic advisers at his ranch in Crawford, Tex.

Afterward, one adviser said they expect the economy to grow a robust 3.7 percent in the second half of this year.

“That’s enough to get jobs,” Council of Economic Advisers head Gregory Mankiw said. “I think you’ll see that in the second half of this year.”

But the president said several times that he doesn’t plan to ask Congress for new tax cuts.

One Republican congressional aide said that doesn’t exclude making current tax cuts permanent. The aide said if Mr. Bush had advocated for new tax cuts, that would probably have detracted from his overall message that the administration has already taken the right steps to help the economy.

The economy has sputtered through the first 2 years of Mr. Bush’s presidency, and he has countered with large tax-cut packages in 2001 and 2003.

Now, recent signs have shown some life. The U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter of this year after growing 1.4 percent the quarter before that.

Still, unemployment has gone from about 4 percent to more than 6 percent under Mr. Bush, and Democrats have made it clear they will use the loss of jobs against the president in the 2004 elections.

“It almost kind of defies common sense for him to say the program is working. It’s just not working because the money is not going into the average citizen’s pocket,” said Sen. Jon Corzine, New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“At some point he’s got to take responsibility for the fact that we’ve gone from record surpluses to huge deficits.”

Mr. Bush blamed this year’s estimated $450 billion deficit on factors beyond his control.

“The deficit was caused by a recession, which we inherited and did something about. The deficit was caused because we spent more money on fighting a war. And the American people expect a president to do what is necessary to win a war,” Mr. Bush said.

He listed a series of events that have buffeted the economy over the last three years, including the stock market beginning to slump in March 2000, the recession in early 2001, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the corporate accountability scandals and the buildup to war in Iraq.

And he painted the choice facing him in 2001 as either passing the tax cuts, which he said meant a shallow recession but also a shallow recovery, or doing nothing, which would have led to a deeper recession.

“A deep recession would have caused more people to lose work. And I’m more worried about families finding jobs and putting food on the table than I am about, you know, economic theory and economic numbers,” he said.

Laura Tyson, chief economic adviser under President Bill Clinton, said this administration’s explanation of deficits is a “short-term half-truth, and a long-term lie.”

She said in the short term the tax cuts were a substantial part of the existing deficit, but in the long run the swing from surplus to deficit “is due entirely to the Bush tax cuts.”

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.