The Washington Post ran a front-page piece today on a White House budget strategy that’s characterized as somehow being clever. Maybe I’m missing the punch line because the story doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
When he takes the House rostrum next week for the State of the Union address, President Bush will list among his goals a balanced federal budget, a shift for a president who has presided over record deficits while aggressively cutting taxes.
Politically, analysts say, the president is calling the bluff of Democrats, who won control of Congress in part by accusing Bush of reckless fiscal policies. While Bush now shares the Democrats’ goal to erase the deficit by 2012, the politically perilous work of making that happen — cutting spending or raising taxes — falls to the Democratic-run Congress.
“The Democrats have assailed deficits under President Bush. The White House is telling Democrats to walk the walk,” said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
I have no idea what this means. The president, the most fiscally reckless and irresponsible in recent memory, will still present a budget to Congress, which will reportedly still use smoke, mirrors, and ridiculous expectations to bring the budget back into the balance by 2012 (12 years after Bush threw it out of balance). Apparently, the “calling the bluff” of Democrats part is that Bush won’t actually try to do any real or substantive work — he’ll just offer some slap-dash budget that he knows will be rejected, and will then tell Congress, “You fix my mess; I don’t feel cleaning it up.”
This, in the eyes of the White House and its allies, is a way of asking Dems to “walk the walk.”
If this is the Bush gang embracing some kind of clever strategy, someone’s going to have to explain it to me.
It may not matter to the folks who create their own reality, but this would be the ideal time for the White House to start taking the budget seriously again.
The government is living far beyond its means, [U.S. comptroller general David Walker] said, and if not for excess cash in the Social Security trust fund, it would be recording deficits on a magnitude not seen since the recession of the early 1990s. Take away the Social Security money, and the deficit would have been $434 billion last year, about 3.3 percent of GDP, which rose 6 percent in 2005, compared with 2004.
That point is critical, Walker told a Senate committee last week, because the Social Security surplus will begin to shrink in 2009, as the baby boomers start to retire. It is it estimated that the fund will dry up completely in 2017. At that point, the nation’s rosy fiscal picture will darken rapidly. Costs for entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare — will explode. Without radical changes in tax policy and retirement spending, the deficit will make up more than 24 percent of the economy by 2050, Walker said.
Bush responds to all of this by “calling the bluff of Democrats,” and telling Congress to tackle his disaster? Huh?
Chris Edwards, tax director at the Cato Institute, told the WaPo, “I get the impression [administration officials are] trying to beef up [Bush’s] reputation for fiscal responsibility, not by doing heavy lifting and actually targeting programs like farm subsidies, but through rhetoric and projections and changes in rules and things that are easy for a president to propose.”
In other words, Bush’s new approach to the budget is eerily similar to his new approach to Iraq: more of the same.