Hypocrisy on Stilts
The American public, not to speak of its elected officials, has been stunningly indifferent to our reckless fiscal course of the past five years. Maybe it's because our focus has been so much on terrorism, but the numbers are terrifying, too. President Bush inherited a budget surplus estimated at $5.6 trillion over 10 years. He has converted that giant plus into a giant minus--deficits estimated at $5 trillion over those same 10 years. Talk about a U-turn!
For most Americans, the numbers are so large, with so many zeros, that the national debt must seem disconnected from any reality. "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers" was the famously candid summation of President Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, in 1981. But any economist with a room-temperature IQ will testify that stratospheric deficits have a huge impact: They mean higher interest charges and higher foreign debt, and they'll burden future generations with lower growth and higher taxes and leave less money to address the nation's genuinely critical needs.
Maybe America hopes for a rerun of the Reagan-Clinton transition, in which the mountain of debt amassed in the 1980s was erased in Clinton's latter years. Or is there confusion between tolerable and even necessary cyclical short-term debt and the more menacing structural deficit?
It doesn't help that Vice President Cheney is quoted as having said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." He'd be singing a much different song if it were a Democratic deficit. That's the politics both parties play, typically proposing to balance the budget by reducing the other party's priorities. Witness Republican pressures on social spending and Democratic pressures to increase taxes on the wealthy or reduce spending for military programs they deem irrelevant.
Profligacy. Congress, to absolutely no one's surprise, seems paralyzed. Just look at the furtive funding of Iraq and Afghanistan, not upfront in the budget but tucked away in a sneaky supplemental appropriation--even as these costs now exceed $100 billion annually. And this is a mere way station to a total cost that will exceed $800 billion by the time Bush leaves office. Add in long-term liabilities, such as healthcare for more than 17,000 wounded U.S. soldiers and interest costs on all that debt, and you're talking a cool trillion dollars. "Real money," as the late Sen. Everett Dirksen once said, in far simpler times.
It is downright scandalous how the supplemental budget process has been exploited as yet another opportunity for congressional pork. Surprise, surprise. The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee from Mississippi finds a way to get his hands on $700 million--for what? To tear up a rail line along the Gulf coast and use the right of way for a new highway along the coast. For what? For land for casinos and similar entertainment. For what? For giving $500 million to Northrop Grumman, in his own state, to help the company pay "business disruption" costs of the hurricane instead of having it collect from its insurance company. Then there's $30 million for the mitigation of bark beetle infestations and forest fire prevention, $6 million for Hawaiian sugar-cane growers, $800 million in additional highway and transit funding, etc., etc., etc. You get the idea.
These "emergency" supplementals are not part of the regular budget. They're a way to portray the deficit as smaller than it really is and protect local pork projects from scrutiny. It is also easier for the Pentagon to duck the hard choices between optional weapons programs and pressing current needs.
It is scandalous the way our politicians have compromised the nation's fiscal health. And it is morally outrageous that President Bush has succeeded in making matters worse by getting congressional support for extending capital gains and the dividend tax cut. These primarily benefit the well-to-do--at a time when middle- and lower-income families face soaring costs of housing, medical care, and gas prices, not to mention jobs with no health coverage or even access to unemployment insurance. So, do our elected officials try to increase the minimum wage? No. Do they try to cut taxes for the poor or provide more medical care? No. What do they do? They give even more tax benefits to the wealthiest.
It was one thing for President Bush to engage in aggressive tax-cutting in his first term, when the economy might have contracted severely in the wake of the dot-com bust and 9/11. Those cuts were defensible. But that emergency is long over. To have avoided a downturn with the idea of picking up the pieces later on works only if there is then some effort to pick up the pieces. Instead, what do we get? Permanent tax cuts.
For Republicans to define themselves as fiscal conservatives after five years of profligacy is hypocrisy on stilts. No matter how cynical you are, it is difficult to keep up with such irresponsibility. Americans are not fools. Just look at the polls!
This story appears in the May 22, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.