During his re-election campaign, President Bush talked about returning “fiscal sanity” to this country. It was a statement so shameless that it should have cost him a second term. How did his conscience allow him to say such a thing after nearly four years of two-fisted spending and gasp-worthy federal defects? Congress had to raise the debt ceiling for goodness sake!
But this political myth — that Republicans are the best doctors for our nation’s economic health — is an enduring one, but a myth none the less.
Case in point: the FY05 federal spending bill. The $388 billion omnibus bill, passed by Congress last week, is chock-full of pork-barrel projects, 11,772 projects at a cost of $15,780,533,623 to be exact, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. Some are pet projects, some are corporate handouts and some are just plain stupid.
Here are a few examples of the later:
$25,000 for curriculum development for the study of mariachi music
$45,000 for A+ for Abstinence for abstinence education
$300,000 for CyberSeniors, Inc. – Experience Senior Power Program
$250,000 for Country Music Hall of Fame
But the congressmen and congresswomen did manage to stop some spending. At the 11th hour, House Republicans instituted changes to the bill that the American Council on Education said could cost 90,000 students their Pell Grant eligibility. An additional 1 million could face reductions in their awards. The change involves using more current tax information when determining a family’s level of need. The FY05 budget also contains language that caps the maximum Pell Grant award at $4,050. President Bush has said he wants the maximum to be $1,000 higher.
Republicans were clamoring for the change in order to cover a more than $3 billion shortfall in the Pell Grant program. And there it is, the fiscal sanity President Bush has promised: Filling budget shortfalls with money meant for low-income students while ensuring corporations get their welfare packages fully intact. It is uncompassionate conservatism at its best. What is a more important spending priority to President Bush than Pell Grants, the largest federal aid source for college students? Sending a person back to the moon by 2020, of course. Congress took the first step toward accomplishing Bush’s goal of boldly going where several men have gone before, by passing a larger-than-expected NASA FY05 budget ($16.2 billion). But this is just the beginning: The new spacecraft alone would cost $24.7 billion, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Meanwhile, on planet Earth, the College Board estimates that students are facing tuitions over 10 percent higher this year. So as tuitions are skyrocketing, Bush is thinking about rockets. He cares more about sending a person to the moon than sending a person to college.

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