International Herald Tribune Editorial - Bush's improbable budget

International Herald Tribune Editorial - Bush's improbable budget
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: February 8, 2007


President George W. Bush claims that his new $2.9 trillion budget request is a tough- minded plan for balancing the books by 2012. In reality, it's a smokescreen for making Bush's tax cuts permanent — and either hollowing out the government in the process or digging the country deeper into debt.

The budget is based on a series of improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions. To make it appear as if the tax cuts are affordable in the near term, it assumes that the Pentagon will not spend a single penny on Iraq or Afghanistan after 2009. It also assumes there will be no costs for fixing the alternative minimum tax after this year, even though Bush and virtually every politician in America is committed to such relief.

The new budget would also slash key entitlement programs and punish many of the country's most vulnerable citizens. Sharp reductions are envisioned for Medicare, with cuts of $66 billion over five years, and Medicaid, down approximately $11 billion.

Bush's budget would also take an ax to most other domestic spending. The $99 million block grant to states to help pay for preventive health care would be eliminated. Other cuts — in veterans' health care, environmental protection, scientific research, low-income housing and heating assistance, to name a few — would start in 2008 and grow, totaling $114 billion over five years. Such cuts would be shortsighted and cruel. They would also be politically impossible to enact — further exposing Bush's budget as the sham it is.

Even if they were achievable, the proposed spending reductions would be grossly unfair. Government programs that serve middle-class and low-income Americans would be slashed to offset the cost of extending tax cuts that favor the rich. By 2012, 20 percent of the tax cuts would go to that richest sliver of Americans; one-third of the benefits would go to households with incomes over $400,000.

Bush's new budget has a few worthwhile nuggets, like funds for AIDS treatment worldwide. In drafting a real budget, Congress can take those items from the president's version, and jettison the rest.