The Axis-of-Inefficiency Budget
The New York Times
February 5, 2002
President Bush's proposed $2.1
trillion budget embraces the word "security" at every turn.
It provides more spending for military security and
domestic security and more tax cuts for "economic
security." But the budget undermines the security of the
nation's social safety net and the government's ability to
carry out some of its basic responsibilities over the next
two decades. It jeopardizes the future of Social Security
and Medicare, whose trust funds would be siphoned away
to underwrite outmoded military projects and tax
reductions favoring the rich. The budget embodies a
divisive agenda for which Mr. Bush has no mandate, in
spite of his popularity.
For weeks the administration has cleverly leaked news
about a handful of domestic programs like family
nutrition, health research and food stamps that were
targeted for spending increases. But the budget the
administration presented yesterday revealed that
everything outside these few programs was up for assault.
According to Mitchell Daniels, the budget director, the
administration is targeting only inefficient programs. The
cuts, he insists, are not aimed at hobbling job training,
environmental programs or labor safety - although those
are some of the areas that will suffer. The administration,
he says, is simply trying to do away with bad
management. Mr. Daniels has created a virtual axis of
inefficiency, and declared war on it.
It is hard to accept Mr. Daniels's sincerity when the
defense budget remains packed with cold- war-era
projects that have no business in the kind of modern,
high-tech military the Bush administration wants to
create. The budget will lock in billions of dollars in future
spending for outmoded technology like the 70-ton
Crusader howitzer and the F-22 jet fighter. Apparently the
only federal programs that can be inefficient are the ones
the Republican Party's right wing doesn't like.
The most discouraging part of the new budget is the way it
disguises the true cost of its tax cuts with accounting
gimmicks and arbitrary expiration dates. Almost
incredibly, Mr. Bush wants to accelerate and make
permanent previously enacted tax cuts and add new tax
cuts on top of them. He says that his actions would cost
more than $600 billion over the next 10 years, but
without the gimmicks they would cost more than $1
trillion.
The Bush budget is a road map toward a different kind of
American society, in which the government no longer
taxes the rich to aid the poor, and in fact does very little
but protect the nation from foreign enemies. If the budget
is adopted as proposed, over the next decade the
increasing cost of the tax cuts will drain the treasury
while the rapidly rising price tag of unnecessary military
projects will make up a larger and larger piece of what is
left.
Virtually everyone supports spending as much money as
it takes to fight the war on terrorism at home and abroad.
But national security does not require new corporate tax
write-offs or contracting for a new fighter plane designed
primarily for cold- war-era dogfights. Mr. Bush is using
the anti-terrorism campaign to disguise an ideological
agenda that has nothing to do with domestic defense or
battling terrorism abroad. The budget discontinues the
tradition of making 10-year projections into the future,
possibly because the administration does not want the
American people to see where the road is heading.
One of the many pieces of this budget that the public
would never accept if consulted is the harm it does to the
future of Medicare and Social Security. When asked
yesterday to address charges that the administration was
not leaving enough money to keep Medicare and Social
Security solvent, Mr. Daniels said both were heading
toward insolvency anyway. His policies seemed intent on
starving the federal government of money to save them so
that they can be "fixed" by PRIVATIZING THEM IN WAYS THAT FAVOR THE WELL-TO-DO.
The budget now goes to Congress, where it needs to be
rethought and stripped of its gimmicks disguising the true
cost of what it wants to do.
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