for those of you not familiar with him, Andrew Sullivan is a conservative.
DAILY EXPRESS
Attention Deficit
by Andrew Sullivan
Post date: 02.09.04
Many conservative commentators greeted the president's "Meet The Press"
interview with considerable gloom . President Bush, they argued, seemed
tired, bumbling, didn't actually answer the questions asked, and failed to
address the most important issues out there in the country. I disagree
somewhat. I felt his answers on the war and its general rationale, his
willingness to concede errors, and his demeanor were strong and appealing
to those who aren't already turned off by this president's character and
personality. But it was in the second part of the interview that things,
to my mind, unraveled. Bush offered no compelling rationale for reelecting
him. He offered excuses on the economy; and, on the critical matter of the
country's fiscal health, he seemed scarily out of touch. Here's the most
worrying section of the interview, with some of my comments:
RUSSERT: The General Accounting Office [GAO], which are the nation's
auditors ...
BUSH: Yes.
RUSSERT: ... have done a study of our finances. And this is what your
legacy will be to the next generation.
It says that our current fiscal policy is unsustainable. They did a
computer simulation that shows that balancing the budget in 2040 could
require either cutting total federal spending in half or doubling federal
taxes.
Why, as a fiscal conservative, as you like to call yourself, would you
allow a $500 billion deficit and this kind of deficit disaster?
BUSH: Sure. The budget I just proposed to the Congress cuts the deficit in
half in five years.
Now, I don't know what the assumptions are in the GAO report, but I do
know that, if Congress is wise with the people's money, we can cut the
deficit in half. And, at that point in time, as a percentage of GDP, the
deficit will be relatively low.
One simple, perhaps nit-picky, point: To the question "Why ... would you
allow ... this kind of deficit disaster?" the president replies, "Sure."
> Sure? I think I know what the president means. It's a verbal place-saver,
a pause. But it's surely worth pointing out that I know of no one who can
reply to an allegation that he is about to deny with an actual
affirmative. "Did you kill your wife?" "Sure. I never touched her." Who
talks this way?
Then the president uses the phrase "if Congress is wise with the people's
money." But the point is that, in the last three years, the Congress has,
by any measure, been grotesquely un wise with the people's money. And the
president vetoed not a single spending measure. In fact, his own budgets
exploded spending on both war and homeland security and every other
government department, from Labor to Agriculture, before the pork-sniffers
in Congress even got started. Then the president simply reiterates, and
doesn't explain, something no one believes, which is that the deficit can
be cut in half in five years--before, as even he would have to concede, it
heads into the stratosphere.
So, in one response, we have a one-word answer that means the opposite of
what it should; we have an irrelevance; and we have a pipe dream. And the
president expects the people to trust him with their money? If your
financial adviser came up with such an answer, after a huge drop in your
personal savings and massive loans coming due in a few years, you'd fire
him. Back to Bush:
I agree with the assessment that we've got some long-term financial issues
we must look at. And that's one reason I asked Congress to deal with
Medicare. I strongly felt that, if we didn't have an element of
competition, that if we weren't modern with the Medicare program, if we
didn't incorporate what's called health savings accounts to encourage
Americans to take more control over their health care decisions, we would
have even a worse financial picture in the long run.
I believe Medicare is going to not only make the system work better for
seniors, but it's going to help the fiscal situation of our long-term
projection.
OK, let me put this gently here. Is he out of his mind? The minor reforms
to Medicare are indeed welcome in providing more choice and some
accountability in the program. But the major impact of his Medicare reform
is literally trillions of dollars in new spending for the foreseeable
future. He has enacted one of the biggest new entitlements since Richard
Nixon; he has attached it to a population that is growing fast in numbers;
and the entitlement is to products, prescription drugs, whose prices are
rising faster than almost everything else in the economy. Despite all
this, the president believes it will "help the fiscal situation of our
long-term projection"? Who does he think he's kidding? It's like a man who
earns $50,000 per year getting a mortgage for a $5 million house and
bragging that he got a good interest rate.
BUSH: We've got to deal with Social Security as well. As you know, I mean,
these entitlement programs need to be dealt with.
We are dealing with some entitlement programs right now in the Congress.
The highway bill, it's going to be an interesting test of fiscal
discipline on both sides of the aisle. The Senate's is about $370, as I
understand, $370 billion; the House is at less than that, but over $300
billion. And, as you know, the budget I propose is about $256 billion.
So...
It would appear from this response that the president believes that
highway construction is an entitlement program. Again: Does he have the
faintest idea what he's talking about?
RUSSERT: But your base conservatives--listen to Rush Limbaugh, the
Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute--they're all saying you're the biggest
spender in American history.
BUSH: Well, they're wrong.
Based on what? They have the numbers. All the president has is words.
RUSSERT: Mr. President...
BUSH: If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my
watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was
up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.
OK, let me be candid here and say I don't know what he means. Does he
believe that discretionary spending has declined each year under his
watch? Surely not. It has exploded during his administration. Is he saying
that the rate of increase has slowed? Again: surely not. As Joshua
Claybourn has shown , Clinton's last budget increased domestic
discretionary spending by 4.56 percent. Bush's first budget increased it
by 7.06 percent. His second increased it by over 10 percent. We have a few
options here: The president doesn't know what he's talking about, or he's
lying, or he trusts people telling him lies. But it is undeniable that
this president is not on top of the most damaging part of his legacy--the
catastrophe he is inflicting on our future fiscal health.
And the other thing that I think it's important for people who watch the
expenditures side of the equation is to understand we're at war, Tim, and,
any time you commit your troops into harm's way, they must have the best
equipment, the best training, and the best possible pay. That's where--we
owe it to their loved ones.
Fine. So why has the president increased discretionary spending outside of
defense and homeland security by such a huge amount? Why the massive
agricultural subsidies? Why the vast new Medicare entitlement? Couldn't he
have said, "Look, we're at war. We cannot afford these other things right
now." Did that even occur to him?
I'm not one of those who believes that a good president has to have the
debating skills of a Tony Blair or the rhetorical facility of Bill
Clinton. I cannot help liking the president as a person. I still believe
he did a great and important thing in liberating Iraq (although we have
much, much more to do). But, if this is the level of coherence, grasp of
reality, and honesty that is really at work in his understanding of
domestic fiscal policy, then we are in even worse trouble than we thought.
We have a captain on the fiscal Titanic who thinks he's in the Caribbean.
Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR. |
