Proposed budget slashes arts, not defense

Call me Ishmael, but not for much longer.

President Bush unveiled his proposed budget… Call me Ishmael, but not for much longer.

President Bush unveiled his proposed budget Monday — a budget that boosts homeland security and defense spending, but slashes spending on the arts, equality education for women and Olympic scholarships, to name a few, according to Reuters. It also slashes funding for a program aimed at native Alaskans and Hawaiians called “exchanges with historic whaling and trading partners.”

All of this means that children will no longer be able to draw, feel empowered, high jump or learn about their Moby Dick-ish history.

And why has Bush decided to call in the irony brigade? His budget slashes funding for alcohol education, recreational programming and literacy. For a proponent of physical education who talks about his own recovery from alcoholism and whose wife is a librarian, his budget directly contradicts his values.

Many of these programs fund non-government projects — think: the National Endowment for the Arts giving money to writers — none of whom suffer from an excess amount of funding.

Bush cited the programs’ redundancy and being out-of-date as reasons for cutting them. If that is the case, then redundancy should be defined more carefully before these programs are eliminated.

Streamlining these or siphoning money from cut programs to better serve remaining ones would be more effective than the slash-and-burn budgeting on which Bush seems so intent.

Moreover, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, this budget doesn’t provide any provisions for funding military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the nation is busy beating its plowshares into swords — in the form of a 7 percent increase in defense spending — we’ll have no money to take care of the two countries that we are occupying.

After defense, education is Bush’s next priority. But for a president whose flagship program is called “No Child Left Behind,” it seems that no child will be left behind because no one will be moving forward. Even though Bush proposed a rise in overall education funding, the fact that he wanted to cut these programs is counter-productive.

Rather than funding additional testing, why not throw money towards literacy programs?

One bright spot in this gloom of spending cuts is Bush’s proposed increase in funding for disadvantaged and handicapped students, according to the Dow Jones wire service. But what’s more disadvantaged than having your cultural heritage taken away, like the native Hawaiians? Making some students more disadvantaged to improve the lives of others leaves everyone behind.