I’ve hesitated to get too bogged down in the details of the president’s latest budget proposal because I know it’s not going anywhere. Congress has its own priorities and agendas, and many lawmakers from both parties have already made it quite clear that Bush’s budget is a no-go. As Stanley Collender, a federal budget analyst at Financial Dynamics Business Communications, said, “This budget is not going to happen. Of all the budgets I’ve seen recently, this is the one going nowhere the fastest.”
Having said that, the White House budget is nevertheless a document that reflects the president’s priorities. Even if Bush’s OMB and Karl Rove know full well that their budget will be ignored, it nevertheless offers a hint about what the president would do if the budget process were entirely up to him. And what are Bush’s priorities? These are Bush’s priorities.
If enacted, the 2007 budget would eliminate federal programs that support inner-city Indian health clinics, defibrillators in rural areas, an educational campaign about Alzheimer’s disease, centers for traumatic brain injuries, and a nationwide registry for Lou Gehrig’s disease. It would cut close to $1 billion in health care grants to states and would kill the entire budget of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center.
In a $2.8 trillion budget, the amounts involved may seem minuscule, but proponents argue that the health care projects Bush has singled out are the “ultimate homeland security,” as Vinay Nadkarni put it. The spokesman for the American Heart Association said he cannot fathom why the administration has recommended eliminating a $1.5 million program that provides defibrillators to rural communities and trains local personnel on how to use the machines to restart hearts that go into cardiac arrest.
“Coronary heart disease is the number one killer in the United States,” Nadkarni said. “This is actually something we can arm ourselves with.”
Keep in mind, the administration is not arguing that these health programs are bloated or wasteful; they’re arguing that the budget is lean and people have to expect sacrifices. As Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt explained, “We had to make hard choices, hard choices about very well-intentioned programs.”
I love that phrase, “hard choices.”
The White House believes every penny of tax cuts for millionaires is not only absolutely necessary now, but has to be made permanent for the future. The cost of these tax cuts every year totals several hundred billion of dollars.
But a $1.5 million program for defibrillators in rural areas is too expensive and has to be eliminated altogether. So does every penny of already-modest funding for a national paralysis center, centers for traumatic brain injuries, and a nationwide registry for Lou Gehrig’s disease, which helps “identify the incidence and prevalence of ALS in the U.S. and collect data which is urgently needed for ALS research, disease management and the development of standards of care.”
The Bush administration faced a rather straightforward choice: more tax cuts or more health care cuts. For them, this was a “hard choice,” and they chose tax cuts.
It speaks volumes about their character.