"Bushed" ... the budget:
salon.com
Bush's budget goes for broke
The new budget numbers make it clear that the president's tax cut was aimed at bankrupting
the treasury all along.
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By Robert Scheer
Aug. 28, 2001 | Are we all dimwits? We just sit there with goofy looks on our faces while
the economy sputters and the president blows what remains of the budget surplus on a tax
giveaway to the rich. With nary a peep as the "what me worry?" kid has the gall to make
stealing funds from Social Security and Medicare -- to pay for a military buildup to fight an
enemy that doesn't exist -- sound like fiscal responsibility.
There is method to the president's madness, as he spelled out in his press conference
Friday, proclaiming that the prospect of government red ink is "incredibly positive news"
because it will produce "a fiscal straitjacket for Congress."
Get it? The plan is to bankrupt the national government so we can be
reduced to life as it's lived in Texas, where the rich make out like
bandits playing with public funds, as George W. did on that stadium
deal, while the rest of the folks scramble. Texas politicians, including
three presidents in the past 40 years, always make sure their
companies are fed well at the Washington trough, even if it means
going to war. Whatever the state of the federal budget, Bush is not
going to be tight with the dollar when it comes to a bloated military, because big oil still
needs that stick of U.S. military intervention to protect its investments abroad.
Why else do we need a military big enough to fight two wars at once except to protect U.S.
investments that stretch from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf? Think of it as a Social
Security program -- or more accurately, welfare -- for military contractors and energy
companies, led by Halliburton, where Dick Cheney hustled his quick millions.
Bush never believed in a progressive federal government,
including its programs for seniors, but he had to pretend
otherwise to win over moderate voters. Now he blithely offers
a recession he helped create and a war that he's not yet
managed to find as a rationale for stealing from seniors: "I've
said that the only reason we should use Social Security funds is
in the case of an economic recession or war."
That was Friday, but Monday the nonpartisan Congressional
Budget Office said that this year $9 billion must be taken out of
Social Security, thanks to Bush's tax cut and the economic
slowdown. What idiocy, to jeopardize the one domestic
government program that really works. Seniors were once the
poorest people around, and now they're the most secure,
thanks to the guarantee of at least a minimum income and
healthcare. If you buy the lie that those programs just benefit
seniors, consider the crushing burden on young families back in
the good old days, when they struggled to provide for aging
parents. Try to launch a career, raise a family and still pay the
health costs of mom and dad, and you'll get the picture.
Unless, of course, your family happens to be super rich like the
president's. For most Americans, Social Security and Medicare are the best family values
programs, and it's mind-boggling that we sit by while a born-rich president who has never
known a second of family financial insecurity threatens to pull the safety net out from under
the rest of us.
Go figure. Maybe we just find it too hard to follow the money -- our money -- particularly
when all those zeros are tacked on. The federal budget is $1.9 trillion, and the $328 billion
that Bush wants to give to the military must just sound like chump change. The big news,
much easier to understand, is the sex life of a hick congressman whose name the baby
boomers will have forgotten 10 years from now when they are informed that there is no
money to cover the health and retirement payments owed them.
By then, the president who conned them will be back at his ranch in Crawford, chuckling
about how he really put one over. As an ex-president, he may even get to cut ribbons at the
umpteenth test of a missile defense program that will still be as far as ever from working.
Of course, wasting money on the military is a time-honored tradition, but with Bush, it's truly
getting out of hand. Even Rep. Jim Nussle, the Iowa Republican who heads the House
Budget Committee, was perplexed by the administration's asking for a defense hike before
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had even completed his review of what the military
requires: "That's unacceptable if they are planning on getting more," Nussle said. "We're not
just going to throw money at defense again."
Sure, he will, and so will most of his colleagues, and Bush knows it. That's why the
president so smugly welcomes the shriveling of the budget surplus as good news, because it
means that those nonmilitary things the government is supposed to do but which he never
approved of, such as healthcare for the working poor, won't get done.
salon.com
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About the writer
Robert Scheer is a syndicated columnist. |
