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Budget battles They Choose, You LoseBy Rick Horowitz
I love flags. Don't you love flags? Sure you do! I'll bet you even love pictures of flags. So do I! And glossy paper -- don't you love great big stacks of glossy paper? Doesn't it make complicated words and charts and graphs so much easier to deal with when the paper they're printed on is nice and smooth? That's exactly the way I feel about it. Which is why I was so excited to see the president's new budget proposal roll off the presses just the other day. It was so big and shiny, it could've been a coffee-table book! And that giant color close-up on the cover of the Stars and Stripes waving in the breeze -- I'll tell you, it took my breath away. But not my fingers and toes. And it just doesn't add up. I'm not talking about the specific numbers the budget suggests for this or that program; I'll leave that to the professional crunchers. I'm talking about the logic behind the entire enterprise. Forget the Stars and Stripes -- how about an enormous chunk of Swiss cheese? Here's the problem: The Bushies want you to believe it's all a choice between A and B. When it's really a choice between B and C. There's a war on. The president says his budget "recognizes the new realities confronting our nation." Which is why he's proposing a massive increase in military spending -- the largest in 20 years -- as well as major new money for homeland security: tighter borders, better preparation against bioterrorism, more support for emergency workers, those sorts of things. No problem. No reasonable person wants to deny the government the tools it needs to win the war, and to try to prevent the one after that, and the ones after that. (Although the thought has occurred to some cynical types that certain less-than-effective, less-than-essential pieces of weaponry that might otherwise find themselves facing elimination will instead use the current crisis to slip back into the budget and live to fight -- poorly, redundantly -- another day.) So nobody's inclined to nitpick the Pentagon, or the other agencies working to ensure our safety. And if that effort takes plenty of additional spending, fine. But then comes the rest of the budget, with a snip-snip here and a chop-chop there. Heating assistance for poor people. Enforcement of workplace-safety standards. Highway construction. Doctor training at children's hospitals. Job training for laid-off workers... "Don't blame us!" the Bushies cry. There's only so much money available, you know, and they had to choose. Choice A: defeating terrorism. Choice B: all that other stuff. Wouldn't you make the same choice they did? But that's not quite accurate. Here's the real choice: Choice A: defeating terrorism. Choice B: all that other stuff. Choice C: big tax cuts for wealthy folks. You see, one reason there's "only so much money available," now and down the road, is the little matter of not-so-little tax cuts. You'll recall a delighted Dubya signing a 10-year, $1.3 trillion tax cut into law last year. (Most of it will go to the sorts of people who don't need heating assistance -- but you already knew that.) Now he wants to make those tax cuts permanent, and while he's at it, he wants to cut plenty of other taxes, too. All told, the crunchers figure, he'd reduce government revenue over the next decade by nearly $600 billion more. Call me naive, but wouldn't it be lots easier to find the money for Choice A and Choice B if Choice C didn't make so much money disappear? Of course, that assumes that your commitment to Choice B isn't just lip service. That you haven't given your heart to Choice C in the first place. "Tax cuts are the way to get a sluggish economy moving again!" the Bushies cry. Of course, they were pushing tax cuts two years ago, too, when their guy was still a candidate and the economy was humming along just fine. "Tax cuts will bring us back to surplus!" they promise. Didn't they used to say that tax cuts would shrink the surplus? They can sell it flat or they can sell it round, but no doubt about it: They're determined to keep selling it. That's their choice. Posted 2/7/02. Running
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Rick Horowitz
