President George W. Bush’s final federal budget can be viewed as a parting gift from an administration that has inflicted more damage on the nation than just about any other in the history of the republic.
The $3.1 trillion budget proposal calls for a $400 billion deficits in each of the next two budget years, created primarily by the tax rebates proposed as a tepid $146 billion economic stimulus and a plan and a boost in funding for defense (about $38.4 billion). The budget also calls for spending freezes and cuts in domestic programs, many of which are incredibly popular, especially among traditionally Democratic constituencies.
The budget also “calls for making permanent Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which have been widely criticized as skewed to the rich and which would begin expiring next year,” the LA Times said.
Doing so would cost Washington more than a half-trillion dollars in forgone revenue over the next five years and more than $2 trillion over the next decade, but the president has argued that they play an important role in stimulating economic growth.
USA Today put it this way:
Winners in the budget include the Pentagon, which would get nearly 8% more, and border security, up nearly 20%. Losers: Medicare and Medicaid, and domestic programs not related to national security.
And, as The Washington Post notes, the
plan omits several costly features, including tens of billions of dollars of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that could drive the deficit even higher than the president’s estimates. That would effectively delay until 2009 decisions on how to cope with short- and long-term financial problems, lawmakers and others said.
The Washington Post quotes one economist, an adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama:
“A whole bunch of things they were putting off and hiding under the rug all these years are starting to pop back up,” said Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago and chief economic adviser to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). “It’s clear they’re trying to shove as much of this as possible on to the next guy.”
President Bush is projecting a surplus, but as the Post points out in today’s editorial, but that projection is based on creative accounting.
Yesterday’s promise of a small surplus by 2012 is once again premised on omitting likely costs (zero is budgeted for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) and by assuming cuts to domestic spending that are unachievable politically and, in large part, unwise as a matter of policy.
Budgets are itemized lists of priorities. The Bush budget — like all of his previous budgets — demonstrates the president’s antipathy toward the people who actually live in this country. His fealty is to the corporate order and the markets that that he and his cronies view with a religious ardor.
President Bush, as The New York Times points out in today’s editorial, has crafted a budget that is “a grim guided tour through his misplaced priorities, failed fiscal policies and the disastrous legacy that he will leave for the next president.”
Much of the budget plan is likely to be excised — the various dailies are reporting that even Republicans are a bit gunshy about moving ahead with a plan that exempts high earners from the kind of sacrifices the rest of us are being asked to make.
But the budget, as the Times points out, will have a lasting legacy:
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.
This brings me back to the USA Today description of this budget as one of winners and lowers. The winners, to put it bluntly, are the people with the cash, the people who control the corporations, who have seen their portfolios increase in value and their peronal bottom lines grow.
The loser? Just about everyone else.
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Hank Kalet 