Bush's short-term dollars make no long-term sense
President Bush claims to be reducing the burden on the American taxpayer.
That's just not true.
With his proposed 2004 budget of more than $2.2 trillion, Bush will have presided over a 19 percent increase in federal spending during his first three years as president. For comparison's sake, the largest three-year increase under President Clinton was 10.7 percent.
Furthermore, defense spending accounts for only a quarter of the Bush increase. Deduct that increase, and spending under Bush will have increased by more than 14 percent.
Nonetheless, the president is traveling the country these days like a slick patent-medicine salesman, dangling the promise of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts before the American people. He is selling the promise of something for nothing.
And while there will always be those who will jump at such a scam, reality always intrudes. The bill always comes due, and somebody has to pay it.
What the president proposes, then, is not a tax cut but a tax shift. Every dollar that he "cuts" from taxes today will have to be borrowed. Every dollar that is borrowed is a dollar added to a national debt that already totals $6.4 trillion. Every dollar in that debt will have to be repaid someday by future taxpayers, with interest.
This year, thanks to large spending increases combined with large tax cuts already on the books, we will run a deficit of $400 billion, about $100 billion larger than in any year in U.S. history. That does not even include roughly $200 billion being borrowed from Social Security, money that ought be set aside preparing for the day the baby boomers start to retire.
Of course, such talk is often dismissed as mere partisan sniping. Only liberals talk that way.
If true, then three years ago Bush and the Republicans who now control Congress were actually closet liberals. They just didn't know it.
"The Social Security surplus is off limits, off budget and will not be touched. We will not stop there, for we are also determined to protect Medicare and to pay down the national debt. Reducing that debt is both a sound policy goal and a moral imperative. Our families and most states are required to balance their budgets; it is reasonable to assume the federal government should do the same."
That paragraph came from the national Republican Party's 2000 platform.
Today, the Social Security "lockbox" has been pried open, pilfered and left to turn to rust by the side of the road. The goal of reducing the national debt -- "a moral imperative," to cite the platform -- has been abandoned as well. This week, the Senate will vote to raise the debt limit to $7.4 trillion -- up from $5.9 trillion barely a year ago, and will have to raise it again by September 2004, even without a so-called "tax cut."
We are stealing from our future, from our children's future, from our country's future. It doesn't take 2020 hindsight to see that. We can see it quite clearly from 2003.
But only if we dare to look.
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