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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (25692)	1/22/2004 6:32:50 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793895

Slowing down Federal spending. Will this help? Yes. But not much. January 22, 2004 - NYT Conservative Republicans Push for Slowdown in U.S. Spending By RICHARD W. STEVENSON WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 — A day after President Bush vowed to submit an austere budget and halve the deficit in five years, conservatives in his own party said on Wednesday that they were not satisfied and stepped up their campaign to force the White House and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to do more to hold down the growth of government spending. Forty Republican House members gathered to hash out how to press Mr. Bush and the Congressional leadership to deal with spending increases that they say are running out of control and a deficit that is reaching alarming proportions. Their discomfort has been echoed in recent weeks by conservative researchers and commentators who support Mr. Bush on most issues. Among them are the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, a political action committee, and The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. "The president used the State of the Union to defend past spending increases, and he made eight specific calls for new spending increases," said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "But he made zero calls for spending cuts. He merely said focus on priorities, cut wasteful spending and be wise with the people's money. That's not specific enough." Mr. Bush had long attributed the sharp swing from budget surpluses to deficits to the recession and the war on terror. Now, he faces political pressure not just from small-government conservatives in Congress and Democrats who say his tax cuts have plunged the government into a sea of red ink, but also from voters. Polls show that the widening deficit is of increasing concern to the electorate and that Republicans are losing their traditional advantage over Democrats on the issue. A poll this month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 51 percent of respondents called the deficit a top priority for Mr. Bush and Congress. That was up from 40 percent a year earlier and 35 percent two years ago. Concern about the deficit was particularly evident among Democrats, 57 percent of whom identified it in the Pew poll as a priority issue, versus 44 percent of Republicans. Democrats said Mr. Bush had mortgaged the nation's future to pay for repeated rounds of tax cuts whose benefits went largely to the wealthy but that had failed to deliver the promised rebound in job creation. The party's presidential candidates regularly use the deficit as a proxy for Mr. Bush's overall economic management and argue that the deficits are leading the government to underfinance programs in areas like health and education. The government ran a deficit of $374 billion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, and the deficit is expected to be around $500 billion for the current fiscal year. When Mr. Bush took office three years ago, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a surplus of $5.6 trillion for the following decade. In recent years, Republicans have focused less on the deficit than on the desirability of holding down spending and enacting tax cuts to help the economy and restrict the growth of government. Politically, Republicans have always been able to rely on their image as the party to trust with the purse strings, and to assert that Democrats would raise taxes not to cut the deficit but to pay for even more spending. But an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this month found that Democrats had nearly caught up with Republicans on the question of which party does a better job of controlling government spending. The poll found that 33 percent of respondents said Republicans did a better job, with Democrats at 31 percent. Fiscal conservatives said it would be hard for them to make progress on deficit reduction in an election year, when lawmakers of both parties would be eager to send more federal money home to their districts. "You're going to have someone upset with you if you do the right thing," said Representative Sue Myrick of North Carolina, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the group whose members were meeting to agree on ways to hold down spending and address the deficit. "That's what we've got to find out: Are our members willing to stand up and do the right thing?" In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Bush said he would send a 2005 budget to Congress next month that would hold the rise in discretionary spending to 4 percent, about what he proposed last year. Liberal groups said Mr. Bush had shortchanged many domestic programs to offset his increase in military spending and the budget for domestic security following the terrorist attacks in 2001. The catchall spending bill for the current fiscal year has been hung up in Congress because of partisan disputes, though Democrats signaled on Wednesday that they would let it pass this week. According to calculations by the Heritage Foundation, government outlays for the current fiscal year will rise 9 percent, after increases of 13 percent in 2002 and 12 percent in 2003, making the last few years among the fastest-growing periods of government spending since the 1960's. White House officials said that Mr. Bush had spent money for the needed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to protect the nation from terrorism and that domestic spending outside security had been held in check. But many conservatives said they were still irked by Mr. Bush's record, especially since he signed into law last year an overhaul of Medicare that amounted to the largest expansion of a federal entitlement program in a generation. "The Republican party has long been the party of small government," an aide to a senior Republican senator said, "but the era of small government has ended for the Republican Party." Referring to Mr. Bush's call on Tuesday night for athletes to stop using performance-enhancing drugs, the aide said, "Unfortunately, the president's ban on steroids doesn't apply to the appropriators." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

To: Lane3 who wrote (25692)	1/22/2004 6:42:48 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793895

You are up at 3:42AM on the Left Coast. That is the "Wee Small hours." You asked yesterday if I ever slept. I am "upsidedown" again. I get back from Dancing by Midnight, and go to bed about 5AM. Get up at noon, take a nap from 4 to 6, and go dancing again at 8. Wintertime, I am 2 hours earlier than PST. 1:42AM here. Crisis Management By Lee Harris Tech Central Station Is it fair to judge a man by a single shriek? I am referring to the sound that Howard Dean made the night of his dismal third place showing in the Iowa Caucus -- a sound that National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg has thoughtfully transcribed for those who did not get a chance to hear it on TV as a word beginning with Y, followed by 16 E's, 6 A's, 3 G's, and 6 H's: YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAGGGHHHHH. But even if it the sound Governor Dean made contained 28 E's and 16 A's, still the question remains: Is it fair to judge his entire candidacy by it? It isn't like Howard Dean is the first man to shriek. I shriek quite a lot myself, and have already done so several times during the current election campaign. But then my shrieks are done in the privacy of my own home, and their reverberation does not pass beyond my walls, whereas Dean's shriek was captured on national television and broadcast to all the world. Yet even so, shouldn't we still give Dean the benefit of the doubt? After all, it is quite probable that the Governor, on reviewing the videotape of his rousing oration, might well wished that the shriek had never happened at all, just as many of us wish that we hadn't made that rude bodily noise during an important job interview. In which case, why can't we all just overlook Mr. Dean's shriek, the same way we all overlook the occasional gaffes of our friends and colleagues? The answer is that we don't always overlook such seemingly minor gaffes, even when they are made by our friends and colleagues -- and this is because there are times when such seemingly minor gaffes are taken by us as inadvertent revelations of the other person's "true" character. When we first meet someone what we see is the surface of his or her personality -- and naturally this is the part that most people take great care to present in the best possible light. It is the realm of what might be called the short term virtues, by which I mean those features of a person that can be observed in a single interview, such as good posture and pleasant manners, punctuality and an adequate grasp of the rules of English grammar. But these virtues, as attractive as they are, do not tell us the whole story about the other person, since there is also a critically important set of long term virtues cannot be taken in at a single glance -- or even, in certain cases, after years of familiarity with the person in question. How long does it take you to know whether a man will panic in a crisis? Well, the answer is simple -- just as long as it takes for you to catch him in a crisis; and often that can be a long time. And the same is true of many other well-known long term virtues, such as loyalty and fidelity. How can you really tell how loyal a person is, if this loyalty has never been severely tested? And how long must we wait before such a test arises? Yet the process of getting to know a person's long term virtues does not necessarily require a long time. Life is full of those peculiar situations in which a chance event happens to illuminate for us the deep structure of another man's character in a flash. One man sees a child drowning and unhesitatingly jumps him to save the child's life, without a thought for his own, whereas another man, by offering a miserable excuse for his failure to follow suit, forever brands himself as a coward. Such a chance event happened this week in Iowa: Howard Dean came in a poor third only a week after the conventional wisdom had all but declared him the Nominee-Elect of the Democratic Party for 2004. Anyone can win, just as anyone can be defeated, and still not give us a clue to their true metal. But for a man to be badly defeated when he expected to win handily, that is certain to be a moment for the revelation of character, and in Governor Dean's case, it offered him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to let the American voters know whether or not he possesses those otherwise how-to-detect long term virtues so necessary to lead our nation in a time of crisis -- virtues such steadiness and magnanimity, endurance and wisdom. This last week, unfortunately for his electoral prospects, Howard Dean revealed the stuff that he was made up and did so in a matter of minutes; and -- fairly or unfairly -- many of those who watched his performance found themselves convinced that they now knew what Governor Dean would act like in a moment of genuine national crisis, and were not assured by the insight that had been inadvertently given them. We should keep this in mind whenever we reflect on the seemingly irrational method by which we as a people select the man to fill the most important office in the world. For the real purpose behind the superficially bizarre rituals of an American election -- caucuses, primaries, televised debates, concession speeches -- is not to provide an exercise in democracy; it is to test the inner resources and character of the candidates, and to do this by exposing them to a grueling series of artificially induced crises that simulate those that he will ultimately have to face as president. The American electoral process is, in a way, like the simulated testing done by the manufacturers of automobile tires -- we want to know which ones are reliable before we put them on our cars, rather than afterwards, and that is why the American people tend to respond so harshly to those candidates who fail to make the grade during this our national period of candidate testing. Iowa was Dean's first crisis -- and he blew it; and in doing so he lost far more than the Iowa caucus: he lost the reputation as a man who could be trusted to act calmly and rationally in the midst of adversity. And that is a lesson that the American people will not quickly forget. We do not live in a world where we can afford to. Copyright © 2004 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com