Site Presented By
Friday, Nov 21, 2008
As for two, Tom Schatz, president of the conservative Citizens Against Government Waste, says: "It does not look like enough is being done to bring down overall spending levels. It's a big budget and there's still a lot of room to cut." In a recent statement, Schatz wrote that Bush and the GOP risk "appearing too cavalier about rising budget deficits and national debt" and may lose "the mantle of fiscal responsibility."
The size of the deficits came as something of a surprise. In July 2002, the year when deficits returned ($158 billion that year), the Bush administration estimated that the deficit would begin shrinking in 2003 and return to a $53 billion surplus in 2005.
Those predictions were obviously a bit off. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars off.
The news has not been greeted warmly. At a Jan. 30 hearing, Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, chastised the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget for their miscalculations. "CBO and OMB, everybody missed the estimates big time in '02," Nickles said. For the clean-livin' Don Nickles, that's practically a cuss-filled tirade.
Despite the cold, hard numbers, Bush's warm, lofty, anti-deficit rhetoric persists. Last year he spoke to leaders of the Fiscal Responsibility Coalition. "I've got a tool, and that's called a veto," he said. "I don't think that's going to be necessary, because I believe, in this difficult time for America, there's a common spirit on Capitol Hill, and one that we can promote and use for the benefit of the people."
There is no evidence, however, of any Capitol Hill kumbaya. In fact, pork barrel spending has only increased. And Bush's veto Mont Blanc has gotten little use; in 2001, President Bush signed a budget bill that amounted to 110 percent of his proposal.
More glaringly, during last week's State of the Union address, Bush said that "we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations."
No doubt the president was referring to the pending military action in Iraq. But the budget notably refrains from factoring in any expenses for the anticipated war. Before he was ignominiously shown the door, former White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey pondered a cost of up to $200 billion for an Iraq assault. And according to a December 2002 study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in a best-case scenario for the U.S. armed forces, the war will cost $121 billion while a longer war will cost $1.6 trillion.
"If we're going to go out and spend tens of millions of dollars on a war with Iraq, we really do need to cut in other places," says Schatz. "So why are we spending $500,000 on the Boathouse Museum in St. Charles, Mo., or $500,000 on the Tongass Coast Aquarium in Alaska, or a million dollars on bear DNA sampling in Montana?"
There are other glaring, and perhaps more consequential budget issues. The Concord Coalition's Bixby adds that the budgets also do not take into account direly needed economic reform measures that the administration had pledged to work on -- revamping both Social Security and the Alternative Minimum Tax.
The CRFB's Tanaka, a former nonpolitical employee of the Government Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office, seems both baffled and amused by other evidence of Bushian flair. The Bush budget proposes a renewal of PAYGO -- the budget rule adopted in 1990 and extended many times since, though it expired in 2002 -- which tries to ensure that budgets stay revenue neutral. "Pay as you go" requires that if a budget cuts taxes or increases entitlement spending above a certain level, one has to raise taxes or cut other spending so the impact is budget neutral. Bush's budget proposes reinstating that fiscally responsible rule, Tanaka notes, but he doesn't abide by it himself.
Get Salon in your mailbox!