Am I the only one who finds press reports like this amusingly ridiculous?
President Bush sent Congress a $2.57 trillion budget plan Monday that seeks deep spending cuts across a wide swath of government from reducing subsidies paid to the nation's farmers, cutting health care payments for poor people and veterans and trimming spending on the environment and education.The budget - the most austere of Bush's presidency - would eliminate or vastly scale back 150 government programs. It will spark months of contentious debate in Congress, where lawmakers will fight to protect their favored programs.
Let's do a little math. Last year's federal budget was $2.292 trillion, with a deficit of $567.4 billion (not including the social security surplus in that figure, as it should not be). Bush's proposed budget is $2.57 trillion with a deficit of $427 billion. A 10% increase in federal spending constitutes an "austere" budget with "deep spending cuts" across the board? And it should be noted that that doesn't even include spending for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which there is a $25 billion supplemental budget already passed, and another $80 billion supplemental appropriation ready to go to the floor for a vote in the next few weeks.
This is sheer lunacy. Neither party shows any interest whatsoever in cutting spending, continuing to run up astonishing debt while transferring obscene amounts of our tax dollars to the corporations that fund their campaigns to convince us that that they're for "smaller government" (in the case of the Republicans) and that they're for the "common man" (in the case of the Democrats). They disagree only on the tiny details, with the full range of opinion on farm subsidies (which are essentially $50 billion a year of tax dollars transferred to huge agribusiness interests), for instance, being whether we should cut them by 2.9% or keep them the same. There are no voices in either major party for true fiscal responsibility and reigning in the staggering growth of government. Which is why we get the comically ridiculous notion that a budget that increases federal spending by 10% is "austere" and has "deep budget cuts".
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Yes, it is a facade Ed. It also doesn't include the figures for making tax cuts permanent or for the Social Security restructuring. Now, I'm a tax cut advocate. But what they're doing, and I mean both parties although it's the Repubs doing it lately, is not a tax cut, it's simply a transfer of tax liability from existing tax payers to future taxpayers, with interest added. The thing that kills me about caving into corporations, is that it's all fairly transparent nowadays, and they're still getting away with it.
More over, missed in all this discussion of tax cuts stimulating the economy, which they can do, is the obvious logic that one cannot cut taxes too much, without sooner or later increasing them, if one wishes to maintain that fiscal tool in sharp, operational condition, for future use.
As I understand it, the Bush's proposed budget does not even include estimates for his operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the deficit will be even higher than projected, even ignoring the fact that the proposed reductions in welfare payments to farmers (so-called "farm subsidies") are highly unlikely to pass.
What really irritates me is that the media keep reporting that these "deep cuts" are in line with Bush's pledge to cut the deficit in half by 2009. Barring some last minute slashing of entire departments, there's no way in hell Bush will come anywhere close to that goal.
I wish they would at least point out that this pledge is impossible to maintain unless he breaks a number of other pledges, like letting his tax cuts expire and dropping his Social Security nonsense.
Unless there is a balanced budget "tax cuts" are really just slipping the tax bills into an envelope and mailing them to our grandchildren.
No wonder Bush managed to drive every company he ever managed into the ground. Now he's running the country...
Why, really, do we need $400 billion for defense? What are the real threats that warrant such an outlay? Who are we so pathologically afraid of?
Or is the Defense Dept. mostly a front for corporations? How often do those in government who facilitate such billions (by pulling the wool over our paranoiac eyes) end up on corporate boards or as lobbyists of the companies enriched by that money?...companies that contribute millions to help elect future facilitators.
I wrote an e-mail to my son, David, last September on this subject. I finished it:
"I really feel I made my patriotic contribution to our 12 year struggle to get our national budget in balance, by paying 4.3 cents more for a gallon of gas, for example. Yet, not the war, not homeland security, not the medicare drug benefit, no nothing does the President think worthy to ask the American people to pay for. It all blithely goes on our national credit card for our children and grandchildren to concern themselves about. All the hard work to balance the budget has gone down the drain by the most irresponsible President in our country's history."
The entire e-mail is here.