I freely admit there are many things I just don’t understand. I’ll never comprehend the appeal of disco, AT&T’s decision to hire Carrot Top as a spokesperson, and how to justify massive tax cuts for the wealthy at a time of deep budget cuts that actually hurt people.
There are four truths occurring simultaneously and each are interconnected — the states are experiencing their worst fiscal crises since WWII, the federal government is cutting spending in every domestic area except defense, our budget deficit has never been higher and is certain to get worse, and the Bush administration is demanding at least a half-trillion dollars in new tax cuts for wealthy Americans who already made out like bandits the last time Bush cut taxes in 2001.
Because of the fungible nature of tax dollars, when the government tries to pass deep tax cuts and avoid catastrophic deficits, funds need to get cut from somewhere. Fewer tax cuts (or heaven forbid, no tax cuts) would mean less need for spending cuts on beneficial government programs.
It creates a zero-sum dynamic — do we cut taxes for the wealthy again or do we restore spending on valuable services?
To be sure, budget cuts have real-life consequences. As Bob Herbert at the New York Times noted yesterday, budget cuts in states like Oregon have led to an environment where sick people can no longer get medicine they need and public schools have been forced to shorten the school year because state officials can’t afford to keep them open.
Oregon is the rule, not the exception. Other states are reducing enrollment in state universities, cutting funding for elderly care, and even commuting prison sentences for low-level felons because the states lack the money to pay for their incarceration.
We’re also just starting to see federal budget cuts and how they’ll affect us. Consider security screeners at Washington National Airport. National, which is just a couple of miles from the White House and the Capitol, was closed for nearly a month in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; the Secret Service actually recommended closing the airport indefinitely due to its strategically significant proximity to the heart of the federal government.
Now, however, the Transportation Security Administration is facing budget cuts and has announced plans to cut 103 security screening jobs from the airport, part of a plan to cut 6,000 airport screener jobs across the country by the fall.
So many of these instances could be avoided with fiscally responsible behavior from the Bush administration, but the president has chosen the wrong path and refuses to turn around.
States with budget crises, for example, could benefit from increased federal aid in areas such as education and health care. Just as importantly, the Bush administration’s unfunded mandates on states — laws that require states to spend state funds without federal assistance — put lawmakers at the state level in an impossible position.
Consider Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation. The education policy demands that states spend tax dollars on a variety of specific programs, but didn’t give states a dime to pay for these initiatives. As New York State Sen. Liz Krueger (D) told the Washington Post, “This is trickle-down economics without the trickle. It’s just mandates without money.”
Fewer (or no) tax cuts in the federal budget would also mean less need to fire security personnel at airports. Bush, however, won’t hear of it. He’s like a jukebox that only plays one song: tax cuts for the wealthy, tax cuts for the wealthy, tax cuts for the wealthy.