Bush's Big Bad Budget

George W. Bush's budget sketches the precipitous decline in our fortunes on his watch, while blurring the full costs of his shameless pander to privilege. In two years, we have fallen from a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion over ten years to a projected deficit of $2.1 trillion. We've gone from fretting about paying off the national debt too quickly to racking up another trillion in interest costs while squandering the entire Social Security surplus. Bush blames "a recession and a war we did not choose" for this decline. September 11 has changed everything, we are told, and the President puts the war on terrorism and defending the "homeland" above all other priorities.

That is a baldfaced lie. September 11 transformed everything except Bush's passionate commitment to erasing taxes on the wealthy. Of the nearly $8 trillion decline in the federal fiscal position, fully $4.4 trillion derives from his tax cuts. Bush prescribes tax breaks for the affluent when the economy is in surplus and when it is in deficit, when it is growing and when it is faltering. He now proposes reforms that will essentially exempt the unearned income of the wealthy from taxation, raising the burden on those who must work to earn their income. Those tax-exempt fortunes are to be free of estate taxes also, so that the wealth may be passed from generation to generation. This son of privilege is committed, above all else, to serving his class, and this takes precedence over everything else. As one example, Bush recently had his minions in Congress vote down spending on such "homeland security" priorities as strengthening our ports or defending nuclear power plants. The French defend their nuclear plants with antiaircraft batteries, but we won't afford it.

Bush proposes a record $307 billion deficit in his $2.2 trillion budget for next year, but with the global economy on the verge of deflation, a larger figure might well be in order to jump-start the economy--if it were to be spent on building schools, cleaning up toxic wastes and other vital public works programs that put people to work. Instead, Bush lards on high-end tax cuts that will have little short-term impact and will sap revenues and add debt in later years just as the nation must deal with the retirement of the baby boomers. The military budget will hit $400 billion, but that doesn't count the cost of actually waging the "war on terrorism"--either in Afghanistan or Iraq. Even so, military spending is $70 billion more than two years ago, and 13 percent higher than the average expenditure during the cold war. Then we faced a global menace; now, we stand alone, threatened more, according to the President's national security statements, by "failed states" and the "embittered few" than by any global adversary. Despite this, the Pentagon is forced to retire planes and ships early. They can't be afforded because of the staggering costs of baroque cold war weapons that the Administration continues to fund in an arms race with itself. The largest single item in the military budget is $9 billion for developing and deploying missile defense--a weapon that doesn't work, against a threat that doesn't exist.

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