Even the most fiscally irresponsible presidential administration in U.S. history realizes it can’t just borrow and spend forever — eventually something has to give. If the federal government is going make any kind of effort to return sanity to its budget, officials will have to either cut domestic spending or reverse the reckless tax policies implemented over the last four years.
Take a wild guess which path the White House will follow if Bush gets a second term.
The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if President Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include spending cuts for virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs, including education, homeland security and others that the president backed in this campaign year.
There are so many problems with this, it’s hard to know where to start.
First, it’s the White House trying to have it both ways again. Bush and Cheney are on the campaign trail emphasizing spending programs they believe will be politically popular — without mentioning their plan to gut these programs if given the chance.
The cuts are politically sensitive, targeting popular programs that Bush has been touting on the campaign trail. The Education Department; a nutrition program for women, infants and children; Head Start; and homeownership, job-training, medical research and science programs all face cuts in 2006.
As the Progress Report noted, it’s part of a disturbing trend.
Two weeks after President Bush touted his commitment to education funding, the White House leaked plans to slash $1.5 billion out of the Department of Education – virtually eliminating previous small increases. It would also slash $177 million out of Head Start, the early-childhood education program for the poor. Less than a month after the president bragged about his commitment to funding veterans’ health care, the White House is ordering a $910 million cut to the existing veterans’ health care budget – a budget the Veterans of Foreign Wars has previously deemed “disgraceful” and “deplorable.” The $78 million funding increase that Bush pledged for a homeownership program in 2005 “would be nearly reversed in 2006 with a $53 million cut.”
Second, in a point the Washington Post largely ignored in highlighting the future cuts, the reductions are more offensive when considered in context with lavish tax cuts for the wealthy.
[W]ith the budget deficit exceeding $400 billion this year, tough and painful cuts are unavoidable, said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Federal agencies’ discretionary spending has risen 39 percent in the past three years. “I think the public is ready for spending cuts,” Riedl said. “Not only does the public understand there’s a lot of waste in the federal budget, but the public is ready to make sacrifices during the war on terror.”
Right, sacrifices are fine in a time of crisis. But who, exactly, does the Bush White House want to see suffer? It certainly isn’t the wealthy few who benefit disproportionately from its skewed tax cuts, which cost the Treasury trillions and makes the cuts necessary in the first place.
While the Bush administration is already planning to slash domestic spending on education, homeland security, and veterans’ benefits, it’s also planning “nonstop” tax cuts for every year Bush is the president.
Oddly enough, the Bush administration is actually asking children to bear the burden twice — once now with cuts in education funding and again later as we pass on crippling debt to future generations. As the LA Times’ Ron Brownstein noted this week:
Every generation, as much as it possibly can, should pay for its own defense.
Today, President Bush and the Republican majority in Congress are engaged in a project unprecedented in American history — pursuing massive tax cuts while the nation is at war. The result is that we are paying for the war in Iraq, like the war in Afghanistan and the entire post-9/11 buildup in military strength and homeland security, almost entirely by increasing the national debt.
Bush is presiding over annual federal deficits so large that the Congressional Budget Office projects the publicly held federal debt will soar by 50% through 2010. In effect, that means passing on the bill for our defense to our children.
No earlier generation of Americans has done anything like it. [John] McCain is right; it’s a mark of shame.
The White House considers this misguided approach and has settled on an approach that is the exact opposite of the responsible course of action.
I’m not opposed to sacrifice; I’m opposed to a policy that burdens the less-fortunate many while shielding the wealthy few from any pain at all.