[Mb-civic] EDITORIAL Avoiding the Real Challenge

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
February 8, 2005
EDITORIAL
Avoiding the Real Challenge

President Bush's latest deficit-steeped budget, for all its tough talk of
reining in spending, stands out as a monument to misplaced political
capital. It would take some hard work, indeed, to get Congress to face up to
the binge of deficit spending that is haunting the nation and future
generations of taxpayers. Yet Mr. Bush is not going to face the music.
Instead, he's investing his precious re-election clout in pushing a wildly
expensive plan to divert some Social Security payments to private accounts,
a step that would not even address the long-term financial problems with the
current system. His proposed budget, meanwhile, is a picture of reduced
revenue and swollen pockets of hidden spending. The lip service about
draconian clampdowns will hardly solve the problem, particularly in the eyes
of the international markets that are studying the administration for signs
of commitment to closing the budget deficit.

Mr. Bush is right to call for a healthy analysis of government programs to
determine which ones cost more than they are worth. But the reductions he
proposes for the biggest targets are timid ones.

To his credit, for instance, Mr. Bush is asking for a reduction in farm and
commodity programs. But his proposed cut of 5 percent - should it somehow
survive in a Congress that has never shown signs of being willing to stand
up to agribusiness - would hardly end that bloated giveaway. It offers
little help for family farmers struggling to deal with the out-of-whack
economics of an agricultural system that is distorted by monster subsidies
to corporate farmers, or for poor farmers in the developing world who are
hobbled by artificially cheap American exports.

While the Pentagon budget continues to boom, Mr. Bush has at least called
for paring back some of the more unnecessary weapons programs from the cold
war. But even if he manages to get the cuts past the arms industry's
Congressional protectors, slowing weapons-building programs or cutting back
on the number of weapons ordered by the Pentagon is never enough. History
shows that these programs will be back to eat up tax dollars another day if
Mr. Bush fails to kill off completely the contracts that feed them.

Proposed cuts in Medicaid funds, while fiercely unpopular with the states,
deserve a close look to see whether the administration can prove its case
that the states game the system for more than their fair share. But the
administration has shied away from even starting to seriously address the
financial problems in Medicare, which is far and away the most deeply
troubled federal entitlement program.

Over all, the budget is a sham that takes big cuts out of politically
vulnerable programs that have very little to do with the explosion of the
deficit in Mr. Bush's tenure.

Programs benefiting low-income citizens, like community development and
health care, are destined to bear close to half of the cuts even though they
accounted for less than 10 percent of the spending increases during the
first Bush term. Some of the cruelest cuts would affect hundreds of
thousands of working poor people who rely on child-care assistance and food
stamps.

The deficit problem is a reflection of lowered revenue more than high
spending - a fact that the president and the Republicans in Congress are
determined to ignore. To the contrary, their proposal is to lock the
once-"temporary" Bush tax cuts into stone. Meanwhile, expensive outlays will
continue for the Pentagon, homeland security and mandated costs like
Medicare. With such a lopsided perspective, vital environmental, education
and housing programs cannot help but be disproportionately trimmed.

As a political tract, the budget neatly omits any accounting for next year's
costs of the Iraq war, lately running at more than $5 billion a month. Nor
do the budget figures for later years mention the hundreds of billions in
borrowing that would be required to start up President Bush's plan to allow
Social Security taxes to be directed into private investments.

Washington hands expect many, if not most, of the president's proposed cuts
to be reinstated by Congress. And given Mr. Bush's preoccupation with Social
Security, it's hard to imagine him wasting much effort on a leaner Pentagon
budget or saner agricultural subsidies. In the end, only the programs with
the least political clout - generally aimed at helping the weakest groups in
the country - will be pared down or eliminated. That might give some
politicians a sense of political cover, but it would be a bad choice and
would hardly solve the problem.

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