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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (502066)	12/2/2003 10:49:22 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The nation's debt is the GOP's bounty WASHINGTON — President Bush likes to talk about the need for "fiscal sanity in Washington." His decision to run up the national debt is entirely sane — as long as you understand his real purpose. Bush doesn't care a whit about deficits. That's because he is not a fiscal conservative. He is a political conservative out to buy himself a majority in 2004 and spending the next generation's money to do it. Some act mystified, as if conservatives are always more responsible with the people's money than liberals. But it's possible to be generous toward social needs, and pay as you go. That's what liberals have usually done. Paul Gigot, The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page editor, once called this approach "balanced budget liberalism." It's conservatives, not liberals, who twice over the past quarter-century have created extravagant deficits. It's also forgotten that redistribution to the poor is not the only way to shift money around. The government's coffers can also be run down by redistribution to the wealthy and to favored interest groups. And when it comes to the politics of payoff, the president and his allies are nothing short of brilliant. Disgorging public money to your friends makes political sense. By recycling a small fraction of the cash back to Bush and his party in the form of campaign contributions, those friends are financing the construction of a mighty political machine. It's a weird form of public financing of campaigns — confined to one party. Bush's first tax cut distributed just enough to middle-class families to give cover for a plan that largely helped the best-off Americans. Next came the dividends tax cut, an even more naked transfer of cash to the wealthy. At least a fifth of the benefits of this year's tax package went to a mere four-tenths of 1 percent of taxpayers, those making over $500,000 a year. One-third of Americans got nothing, and half got less than $100 a year. But it doesn't stop there. Public spending per person is higher under Bush than it was under Bill Clinton. Where is it going? A share of it is for big increases in defense spending. Assume all that spending is justified. It still helps build a Republican majority. The people at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and the like give the bulk of their campaign contributions to the Republicans. The Medicare drug bill seeks to expand Bush's reach to senior citizens. But many of its provisions help core Republican constituencies, including private health plans that get billions to compete with Medicare. Another $25 billion goes to rural hospitals. Troubled urban hospitals don't get similar help, but urban areas didn't vote for Bush. Another $6 billion in the bill for health savings accounts also helps Republican contributors. The pharmaceutical companies are so generous to Republicans that they might start giving out free Viagra and Lipitor at fund-raisers. Drug company executives love it that the drug bill forbids Medicare from using its bargaining power to bring down the cost of drugs. Fiscal conservatives might want to contain taxpayer outlays to the drug manufacturers. Political conservatives prefer to protect their industry friends. Then there is that amazing $31 billion energy bill, blocked so far by genuine fiscal conservatives such as Sen. John McCain. Bush and most Republicans had been fighting hard for the bill's extravagant subsidies to all sorts of special interests, beginning with the oil and gas industry. And why not? As The Washington Post's Tom Edsall reported, the bill provides benefits to at least 22 executives and their spouses who have qualified in Bush's two top categories of fund-raisers. At least 15 lobbyists for interests helped by the bill and their spouses achieved similar Bush MVP fund-raising status. Back in the Clinton days, self-styled "deficit hawks" decried efforts to pass universal health coverage on the grounds that doing so might deepen the deficit. Now, many of the same supposed deficit hawks happily vote for budget-busting giveaways that benefit their party's ideological and business allies. Politicians who can't say 10 words without praising "free markets" back big subsidies that will tilt the market toward their contributors. Few challenge their capitalist credentials. Building transit, roads and schools, and helping the young and the poor to buy health insurance and get a better education — these might justify deficits to finance investments for the next generation. Sending us into a hole to buy an election and to help well-connected interest groups just doesn't seem worth it. The New Big Spenders are very different from the old ones. How long will it take us to understand that? E.J. Dionne's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is postchat@aol.com Copyright 2003, Washington Post Writers Group