EDITORIAL – Another irresponsible federal budget from the CEO president

They’re supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Remember that? The Republicans play… They’re supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Remember that? The Republicans play this card once every, oh, four years or so – don’t vote for that bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend Democrat. He wants to take your hard-earned money and give it to crack-addicted ghetto youth.

No, that’s not what you want. What you want is the party that will run the country like a business, the party with the CEO mentality. Fiscal responsibility. Tax cuts. Cut the fat out of this irresponsible spending.

That’s the Republican sales pitch. That’s our administration. Hell, President Bush and half his cronies are former CEOs. So who should know better about responsible spending?

Maybe that’s what makes the president’s new budget proposal for the 2007 fiscal year so surreal. That’s right, kids, it’s that time of year again. From the people who brought you The Biggest Spending Deficit in History comes the 2007 presidential budget proposal. Nope, no tax-and-spending here. Just good, old-fashioned, spend-spend-spending. And program cuts. Across the board.

According to The Washington Post, Bush’s proposed $2.77 trillion budget seeks, first and foremost, to cut the deficit, which the administration made its goal to halve by 2009. The budget, if implemented, would exceed those plans, cutting the deficit to a very responsible $183 billion by 2010, a figure considerably lower than this year’s record-setting projected $423 billion. Sounds like a good thing, right?

There’s a catch. Bush’s budget proposes to make permanent his generally unpopular package of tax cuts – you know, the ones we weren’t supposed to be able to afford back when they were implemented, where Steve Forbes got a new Hummer and you got a bag of chips and a six pack.

And because of that, the deficit shoots back up to $205 billion in 2011, just in time for Bush to have left office touting his administration’s triumph in reducing the deficit they created by more than half.

What’s the cost of admission to this triumph-on-paper deficit reduction? Don’t worry. Only deep cuts in spending on Medicare, education, agriculture, transportation, Medicaid, children’s health, the food stamp program, federal student aid, the National Institute of Health, cancer and heart disease research, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Minority Health, the training of health care professionals and 128 other federal programs.

The budget would even cut 11.2 percent out of the funding of The Army Corps of Engineers, the organization that was so strapped for resources it was never able to upgrade the New Orleans levees it knew were substandard before Hurricane Katrina hit.

According to The New York Times, Bush’s budget does call for the expansion of some programs, virtually all of them security related. The defense budget would rise 6.9 percent to $439 billion, accounting for more than a sixth of the total budget. The Department of Homeland Security would see an increase in funding, military pay would go up and research into clean energy would increase by 22 percent. The budget also includes provisions to fund an American Competitiveness Initiative that seeks to increase tax credits for research and development in the sciences and to develop science and math teachers.

The plan also allocates $50 billion to the war in Iraq – you know, the one we weren’t supposed to be able to afford when it started – although officials have already said that requests of upwards of $70 billion in funding in addition to that amount may be necessary to pull the war effort through the fiscal year.

The Washington Post also reports that Bush’s tax cuts and extensions would drain the Treasury of a whopping $1.7 billion over the next 10 years, to say nothing of the cost of Bush’s pet favorite: the partial privatization of Social Security – you know, the floundering plan we weren’t supposed to be able to afford back when it was proposed. Between that and the aforementioned cuts, spending would actually increase under Bush’s money-saving plan by more than $550 billion, while simultaneously cutting taxes even further. Of course, Bush didn’t bother to factor that little gem into his deficit-reduction projections. Maybe because it would turn them into deficit-inflation plans, and those are much harder to sell in an election year.

That’s some fuzzy math, there, Tex. Is this part of that “mandate” the administration decided it had when Bush was re-elected? Did America call out, “We need a new budget that cuts crucial social programs of every kind, kills Social Security, doesn’t account for the full costs of the war, drains the Treasury, increases spending and decreases tax revenue?” This budget includes even more irresponsible tax cuts and defense spending, and asks the people with the least money to pick up even more of the bill.

So there we have it, the CEO president and his shiny, debatably deficit-reducing budget. Lower taxes. More spending. Fewer social services. Higher healthcare costs. Just what we need. It might suggest itself that this is not, in fact, a good example of how to run America the way you’d run a business. But considering how Bush’s buddies run their businesses (maybe Ken Lay recommended a good accountant to Dick Cheney) and how G.W. himself has never once succeeded as a CEO in the private sector, maybe this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.