It’s the economy, smarty-pants. No, not the growth rate which the public is smart enough is not amenable to easy manipulation. Not even the unemplyment rate, which may well recover after the war. I mean the explosive rate of current government spending and the president’s utter insouciance about how to pay for it. I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his latest budget removes any. He’s the most fiscally profligate president since Nixon. He’s worse than Reagan, since he’s ratcheting up discretionary spending like Ted Kennedy and shows no signs whatever of adjusting to meet the hole he and the Republican Congress are putting in the national debt.
NO WAR BUDGET?? His budget contained the following piece of illiterate flimflam: “The budget would be in double digit deficit if had there never been a tax cut in 2001. The budget returned to deficit because of war, recession and emergencies associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11th.” Up to a point. But as the tables in the budget also showed, the tax cuts have also contributed significantly to the deficit – and they’ve barely taken effect yet. I’m also staggered that the budget does not contain any mention of the looming war. I guess you could make a semantic point about its not being inevitable – but not even as a possible contingency? Is that how an ordinary citizen plans his own budget? Read David Broder’s evisceration of Bushonomics yesterday. Or Steve Chapman’s devastating recent column on the same theme. These guys are not Paul Krugman. They don’t hate the president whatever he does. They’re just noticing an awful legacy in the making. In the first three years of Bush’s presidency, Chapman notes, non-defense discretionary government spending will have gone up an inflation-adjusted 18 percent. In Clinton’s first three years, that number actually fell. Reagan reduced this type of spending by 13 percent in his first three years. Yes, a deflationary and recessionary period probably merited some spending increases. But 18 percent? If a Democrat had done that, the GOP would be all over him. And rightly so.
NO EXCUSES: But what really bugs me is that the president doesn’t seem to give a damn. He could say: look, we’re running deficits because I need to pay for a major war and tax cuts will help get us out of a recession. Instead, he told us last year that deficits would be temporary and this year that, er, well he didn’t say anything much about them in the SOTU, did he? Or he could say: Okay, I know I’ve turned the spigot on for the last couple of years but I’m going to be a hard-ass from now on. But on what grounds do we believe him? Even after the last two years of budget-busting recklessness, he’s still proposing spending increases far higher than the rate of inflation for the next year.
DEBT BE DAMNED: Then again, he might say: I’m deliberately creating new deficits because they’re the only long-term way to keep domestic spending under control. But what this amounts to is saying I’m going to spend your hard-earned money now in order to persuade other people to stop spending your hard-earned money later. What other people? You’re the government, Mr President. And your party controls all of Congress. There’s no way you can pass the buck for plunging the next generation into debt through excessive spending while blaming someone else. His final option is to say: I’m a big government conservative. I want to spend gobs of money on the military and defense, cut taxes, and splurge on social discretionary spending to prove my compassionate credentials. Deficits don’t matter. Debt doesn’t matter. Governments – at least while I’m president – know better how to spend money than individuals do. That would be the honest message. And it might even be a winning one. So why the flim-flam? Maybe because actual fiscal conservatives like me might wail. Well, sorry to disappoint you, Mr President, but I’m going to wail anyway.
The Dish 