When it comes to red ink, George W. Bush has a colorful history. In 1997, as he began toying with a presidential campaign, Bush called for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution because we “owe it to our children” to avoid deficits. In 2001, he described deficits as “dangerous” and promised to pay down “an unprecedented amount of our national debt.” In 2002, he promised “our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term.”
In hindsight, it would be comical if it weren’t so wrong.
The federal budget the White House unveiled yesterday is so ridiculous, it’s hard to know where to start. One could point to the fact that Bush wants the poor and elderly to sacrifice so he can afford to give tax cuts to millionaires. Or perhaps one might note that the military budget, if it were up to the president, would swell to a jaw-dropping $713.1 billion. Or maybe one should emphasize the fact that Bush’s projections are based on a ridiculously sunny economic forecast, which no credible person could possibly take seriously.
But my personal favorite is the breathtaking scope of the president’s debts.
What will definitely outlast Mr. Bush for years to come are big deficits, a military so battered by the Iraq war that it will take hundreds of billions of dollars to repair it and stunted social programs that have been squeezed to pay for Mr. Bush’s misguided military adventure and his misguided tax cuts for the wealthy.
The president claimed on Monday that his plan would put the country on the path to balancing the budget by 2012. That is nonsense. His own proposal projects a $410 billion deficit for 2008 and a $407 billion deficit next year. Even more disingenuous, Mr. Bush’s projection for a balanced budget in 2012 assumes only partial funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2009, and no such spending — zero — starting in 2010.
It also assumes that there will be no long-running relief from the alternative minimum tax — which would be ruinous for the middle class — and that there will be deep cuts in Medicare and other health care spending that have proved to be politically impossible to enact.
Just a couple of years ago, Bush and his cohorts were boasting that they’d successfully cut their own record-setting deficits in half, ahead of schedule. So much for that idea.
The WaPo adds this tidbit of news:
The federal debt will have climbed to $9.7 trillion by the time Bush leaves office, a rise of $4 trillion during his administration, according to the budget.
Interest on the debt next year will total $260 billion, about what will be spent by the departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Justice combined.
That’s just the interest. Before taking office, Bush argued, “Interest payments on our national debt are now our nation’s largest expenditure. What a waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.” At the time, the deficit was a fraction of what it is now, and headed towards zero.
And Prof. DeLong explains that it’s worse than it appears.
[The] reference to “near-record levels” of the deficit doesn’t give a full and fair account of the magnitude of what can only be called a clown show. The headline deficit number ought to be $738 billion–we have a $331 billion Social Security surplus for 2009, and an honest and honorable administration would be using that surplus to pay down the government debt in order to get ready for the challenges that our aging population will pose for the federal budget over the next two generations. The headline number shouldn’t be 2.7% of GDP; it should be 4.8% of GDP. That is how far Bush fiscal policy is from what a prudent and responsible fiscal policy should be.
What I’d love to see now is some enterprising DC reporter make note of all the times the White House talked about “cutting the deficit in half” by 2009. On its face, it was a ridiculous claim — Bush created half-trillion dollar deficits, and promised to curtail them to quarter-trillion dollar deficits. That’s a bit like an arsonist setting 10 fires and then bragging, “Eventually, I’ll help put five of them out. Isn’t that great?”
Except even the foolish goal proved meaningless. After more than 1,000 references to cutting the deficit in half, Bush plans to hand his successor deficits of at least $400 billion.
And let’s not forget, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee all appear anxious to follow in Bush’s footsteps, embracing similar economic and budget policies.