Bush's fiscal policies of bait and switch By Paul Krugman (NYT)
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
PRINCETON, New Jersey: Yesterday's absurd conspiracy theory about the
Bush administration has a way of turning into today's conventional wisdom.
Remember when people were ridiculed for claiming that Vice President Dick
Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, eager to fight a war,
were hyping the threat from Iraq?
Anyway, many analysts now acknowledge that the administration never had any
intention of pursuing a conventionally responsible fiscal policy. Rather, its tax
cuts were always intended as a way of implementing the radical strategy known
as "starve the beast," which views budget deficits as a good thing, a way to
squeeze government spending. Did I mention that the administration is planning
another long-run tax cut next year?
Advocates of the starve-the-beast strategy tend to talk abstractly about "big
government." But in fact, squeezing government spending almost always means
cutting back or eliminating services people actually want (though not
necessarily programs worth their cost). And since Tuesday was Veterans Day,
let's talk about how the big squeeze on spending may be alienating a surprising
group: The nation's soldiers.
One of President George W. Bush's major campaign themes in 2000 was his
promise to improve the lives of America's soldiers - and military votes were
crucial to his success. But these days some of the harshest criticisms of the
Bush administration come from publications aimed at a military audience.
For example, last week the magazine Army Times ran a story with the headline
"An Act of 'Betrayal,'" and the subtitle "In the midst of war, key family benefits
face cuts." The article went on to assert that there has been "a string of actions
by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits,
including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity
paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty."
At one level, this pattern of cuts is standard operating procedure. Just about
every apparent promise of financial generosity the Bush administration has
made (other than those involving tax cuts for top brackets and corporate
contracts) has turned out to be nonoperational. No Child Left Behind got left
behind - or at least left without funds. AmeriCorps got praised in the State of the
Union address, then left high and dry in the budget that followed. New York's
firefighters and police officers got a photo-op with the president, but very little
money.
For that matter, it's clear that New York will never see the full $20 billion it was
promised for rebuilding. Why shouldn't soldiers find themselves subject to the
same kind of bait and switch?
Yet one might have expected the administration to treat the military differently, if
only as a matter of sheer political calculation. After all, the military needs some
mollifying: The Iraq war has turned increasingly nightmarish, and deference
toward the administration is visibly eroding. Even Private Jessica Lynch has, to
her credit, balked at playing her scripted role.
So what's going on? One answer is that once you've instilled a Scrooge
mentality throughout the government, it's hard to be selective. But I also
suspect that a government of, by and for the economic elite is having trouble
overcoming its basic lack of empathy with the working-class men and women
who make up our armed forces.
Some say that Representative George Nethercutt's remark that progress in Iraq
is a more important story than deaths of American soldiers was redeemed by
his postscript, "which, heaven forbid, is awful." Your call. But it's hard to deny
the stunning insensitivity of Bush's remarks back on July 2: "There are some
who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us
there. My answer is bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the
security situation." Those are the words of a man who can't imagine himself or
anyone close to him actually being in the line of fire.
The question is whether the military will start to feel taken for granted.
Publications like Army Times are obviously going off the reservation. Retired
military officers, like General Anthony Zinni - formerly Bush's envoy to the
Middle East - have started to offer harsh, indeed unprintable, assessments of
administration policies. If this disillusionment spreads to the rank and file, the
politics of 2004 may be very different from what anyone expects.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
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