Real Men Don't Worry About Deficits
[EDIT: Ok, this one is six months old, but its point is still valid, and was written before the pork laden bill was pushed through.]
Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist and author of the upcoming book, The 2 Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love, to be released in September 2003.
The shocking mix of fiscal madness and duplicity President Bush unveiled on July 15 with his updated budget is more than depressing. It shows this Bush to be a thousand times less responsible a national steward than his father.
The deterioration in the nation’s fiscal outlook since Bush took office is stunning. In April 2001 the Bush White House forecast a surplus of $334 billion for this year. On July 15 it announced the deficit would instead be $455 billion.
That’s a swing of $789 billion in just two years. Bush says next year the deficit will rise to $478 billion -- and that’s before taking full account of the ongoing costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. Over a decade, the change from the projected surpluses Bush inherited to the deficits he now expects is roughly $9 trillion.
But amazingly, the White House says the three tax cuts it has passed have nothing to do with this historic reversal. It’s war. It’s recession. It’s "big spending."
It’s poppycock. Under Presidents Reagan and Bush the elder, federal spending averaged 22 percent of GDP. George W. Bush’s budgets will take spending from around 20 percent of GDP toward 19 percent over the next decade.
Even skeptics who think Bush is lowballing his spending plans reckon he’ll come in at 21 percent -- the equivalent today of $100 billion a year less than what Ronald Reagan and Bush's father spent.
Revenue as a share of GDP is the measure to watch. From 21 percent of GDP in 2000 and 20 percent in 2001, revenue will drop to 16.3 percent of GDP this year, and 16 percent in 2004. This is happening mainly because of Bush’s tax cuts.
As can never be said often enough, these are tax cuts that shower their chief benefits on the wealthiest Americans, at a time when we’re spending billions on a war in Iraq and its aftermath, and the deficit is soaring to historic heights. How can the president defend this immoral brand of burden-sharing -- in which the best-off get hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in rebates even as body bags come home and billions in fresh debts pile up for the kids?
Only a president deep in denial could make the case for such priorities without shuddering. But the evidence of Bush’s duplicity on taxes is rising almost as fast as his borrowing.
Only a president deep in denial could make the case for such priorities without shuddering.
As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, by 2004, revenue as a share of GDP will fall to its lowest levels relative to the size of the economy since 1950 -- when programs like Medicare and Medicaid did not exist.
Democrats on the House budget committee, meanwhile, calculate that Bush’s tax cuts will cut revenue by roughly $3.7 trillion over a decade, roughly the same amount that Bush says he’ll rack up in deficits.
Even Ronald Reagan, who quadrupled the national debt in eight years, felt compelled to limit the damage. After his 1981 tax cuts opened up gaping deficits, he quietly raised taxes repeatedly in subsequent years to stem what would otherwise have been an even larger tide of red ink.
George W. Bush is different. In Dubya’s White House, real men don’t worry about deficits. Bush’s gamble is that he can sell voters on the lie that deficits on today’s scale were unavoidable in the wake of 9/11 and sluggish growth.
And if this means a responsible Democrat has to talk about canceling Bush’s tax cuts to solve the problem, well, what better way to wage a campaign than against some tax-hiking liberal?
Bush and his team fancy this shows how smart and tough they are. But Bush is really proving how decent a president his father was. Bush Sr. cleaned up the whopping S&L crisis he inherited, a thankless task that brought no political payoff. He raised taxes as part of a bipartisan deal to cut Reagan’s deficits, a responsible step that helped cost him a second term.
In short, Bush the father cleaned up messes and avoided making new ones -- like a responsible patrician would. The son has intentionally turned fiscal lemonade back into lemons in order to further the Right’s ideological crusade against government. It’s a shabby sequel to a class act.
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