On Monday, President Bush released his projected budget for 2005, and ever since I have spent every spare second of my free time pouring over all 3,000 pages of …
Okay, I’ll be straight with you. I haven’t read one page of Bush’s budget. I didn’t know he had released the damn thing until I read it in the newspaper today. Look, the Emerald is giving me 10 bucks and a good-job-old-chum pat on the butt per column. What do you want from me? Investigative journalism?
Furthermore — and I’d like to stress this point — I am not an economist. I am not good with numbers and really don’t understand budgets. I can’t even balance my checkbook. I am probably the last person on this campus who should be commenting on Bush’s $2.4 trillion proposal.
That being said, I am absolutely outraged by this budget. Outraged! I mean, I knew Bush was “starving the beast,” but who could have guessed he would be so obvious about it?
“Starving the beast” refers to a counterintuitive strategy whereby tax cuts and over-the-top spending are used to starve the government of money and force cuts to public spending. It is spending for the sake of cuts.
Ronald Reagan’s budget director David Stockman coined the phrase, or so it said when I Googled him. Again, what do you want from me? Actual research? Why don’t you read a real newspaper, you cheap bastard?
Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that this budget has got me hopping mad! Bush’s spending priorities are so fiscally irresponsible that even some Republicans are starting to bristle.
Sure, it took projected deficits of $521
billion — much of which is going to a useless war in Iraq that is threatening to suck another $50 billion of taxpayer money not included in the budget — before these conservatives raised their heads out of the sand. But better late than never I guess. Bristle away!
I have an idea: Let’s just scrap that new Medicare package that was recently enacted, which is going to cost one-third more than originally estimated. Then we would have a surplus of $13 billion. Or, if you are partial to health, let’s junk that whole Social Security thing. That would have us $29 billion in the black.
My point: Cuts alone are not enough. We need a progressive tax structure in this country that would dramatically lower the burden on the middle class while forcing the rich and their multinational corporations to pay a fair share.
Bush, by contrast, wants to use the deficits that he created through unnecessary spending as an excuse to cut an array of useful social programs. Here are a few examples:
* The Small Business Administration takes the largest percentage cut in Bush’s plan: Over 83.4 percent according to the Associated Press. I guess Bush’s tax cuts for the rich have trickled down to small businesses by now, making the SBA
irrelevant. Good news: Bush’s budget includes $1.1 trillion more in tax cuts for the rich over the next 10 years. I guess it’s the third tax cut for the rich that creates new jobs. Or is it the fourth? I hope jobs come soon because after this column I think I’m going to need one.
* The Justice Department would take cuts of 12.7 percent in Bush’s budget, which makes sense if you think about it: Since Ashcroft took over there’s been very little justice going on in this country. (Sometimes they write themselves.)
* Bush’s 5-percent increase in overall spending for education, which is being labeled as progress, carries the nasty sting of 38 eliminated programs in the arts and counseling departments.
* Bush’s war on drugs also takes a hit in his budget. They will still be going after those potheads in full force. However, this budget eliminates a program used to locate methamphetamine labs. Luckily, Bush’s cocaine-induced dream of sending a man to Mars was spared the ax and fully funded.
Bush seems intent on starving the beast of government by giving our tax dollars to his pals in high places. Now, if his friends were good people doing good things, that wouldn’t be a problem.
Unfortunately, Bush’s friends are in defense and oil. That means that while he is gleefully starving social programs, we can all look forward to endless war, which, like the war in Iraq, will serve no other purpose than to enrich those who make their living by building the tools of humanity’s destruction.