Sometime you just gotta. Gotta add emphasis, too.
Fiscal Shenanigans
President Bush appears to be planning to run for re-election as a tax cutter without discussing what federal programs will be sacrificed to make up for the lost revenue. That can't be allowed to happen. Voters have the right to see the whole picture, including the downside. Chances are they won't like the view.
While Mr. Bush has been out crowing about spending increases in some popular programs, his Office of Management and Budget was instructing federal departments to prepare to pare them down. In a May 19 memo that was first reported in The Washington Post, departments were told to trim domestic discretionary spending in 2006, the first complete fiscal year after the November election. And the administration recently submitted legislation to impose caps that would result in further reductions in every year after that through 2009.
According to estimates by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Office of Management and Budget guidelines translate into inflation-adjusted reductions in 2006 alone of about $925 million for Head Start and childhood education. That would come at a time when schools are already struggling to meet the demands of Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative without adequate resources. College financial aid, mainly Pell Grants, would take a $550 million hit — at a time when lower-income students are dropping out of school because they cannot meet rapidly rising costs.
The same projections show that veterans' medical care would be cut by $1.5 billion (after a planned $380 million cut in 2005). All told, under the proposed cuts, total funds for these and other affected programs — like environmental protection, housing programs and nutrition aid for poor pregnant women and children — would be $21 billion less in 2006 than today. By 2009, domestic discretionary spending, not counting homeland security, would be $45 billion below its current level and would be a smaller portion of the economy than it has been at any time since 1963.
Two key things:
even all of the proposed cuts in the memo would barely begin to make a dent in the annual deficits, which are likely to range from $300 billion to $400 billion for the rest of the decade.
Understand this well. This is not a matter of "Oh, you want the gummint to solve all your problems." This is a matter of the approach the Bushista/Neocon Axis being unworkable no matter how you slice it. Second:
Some of the staunchest tax-cut supporters in Congress are perfectly aware that the math doesn't work. They hope the accumulating pressure of the deficits will eventually force the federal government to go further and cut entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Very few of them, however, are prepared to run for re-election on that plan.
We need to make them run for reelection on that plan. Every time they speak, the question needs to be asked: since economists (other than the .00001% on your payroll) know the tax cuts and current expenditures are unsustainable, exactly what would you cut?
Those who recognize the Bushista bullshit for what it is have the advantage of being able to say quite precisely what the problem is and how to solve it.
