NYT editorial: Bush's "sham" budget is a "smokescreen" for making his tax cuts permanent

[DeepModem Mom]

Mr. Bush’s Improbable Budget
Published: February 8, 2007

President Bush claims that his new $2.9 trillion budget request is a tough-minded plan for balancing the books by 2012. In reality, it’s a smokescreen for making Mr. Bush’s tax cuts permanent — and either hollowing out the government in the process or digging the country deeper into debt.

The budget is based on a series of improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions. To make it appear as if the tax cuts are affordable in the near term, it assumes that the Pentagon will not spend a single penny on Iraq or Afghanistan after 2009. It also assumes there will be no costs for fixing the alternative minimum tax after this year, even though Mr. Bush and virtually every politician in America is committed to such relief.

The new budget would also slash key entitlement programs and punish many of the country’s most vulnerable citizens. Sharp reductions are envisioned for Medicare, with cuts of $66 billion over five years, and Medicaid, down approximately $11 billion. Some of the Medicare proposals could serve as useful starting points for a debate on controlling costs through such steps as raising premiums for high-income beneficiaries. But the Medicaid cuts would be largely counterproductive. At a time when the number of uninsured children is rising, the cuts would force many states to reduce their Medicaid rolls.

Mr. Bush’s budget would also take an ax to most other domestic spending. One program that would be gone entirely in 2008 provides monthly bags of groceries, each worth less than $20, to 440,000 needy elderly people. The $99 million block grant to states to help pay for preventive health care would also be eliminated. Other cuts — in Head Start, veterans’ health care, environmental protection, scientific research, low-income housing and heating assistance, to name a few — would start in 2008 and grow, totaling $114 billion over five years. Such cuts would be shortsighted and cruel. They would also be politically impossible to enact — further exposing Mr. Bush’s budget as the sham it is.

Even if they were achievable, the proposed spending reductions would be grossly unfair. Government programs that serve middle-class and low-income Americans would be slashed to offset the cost of extending tax cuts that favor the rich....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/opinion/08thur1.html?hp

[RufusTFirefly]

1. Do tell

[subterranean]

2. "improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions."

I would expect nothing less from this administration.

[Skink]

3. Yeah that'll get past Durbin et al.

[HuffleClaw]

4. its meant primarily as a vehicle for attacking ANY dem attempts to cut it

from what i can tell.

the usual 'they won't support the troops' and 'the dems want to INCREASE TAXES' screams...

[necso]

5. It is to be expected from the neocons

that they will constantly try to further their agenda, under one guise or another.

A few relevant points of that agenda are: essentially destroying government (destroying government effectiveness/oversight; contracting out government functions; using government funds/offices to reward/punish; the complete politization of government; bringing the civil-service to heel; breaking potentially-resisting players (unions, individuals) within government; etc), funneling money to the elite (tax cuts; deregulation and lack of oversight; lobbyist-written legislation; no-bid, phony-bid, rigged-proposal contracting; providing opportunities for large-scale looting; etc) and depriving the ordinary people of government services (government ineffectiveness; government service cuts; burden shifting to states, organizations, individuals, etc ("ideally" accompanied by new, underfunded requirements for performance, along with penalties for noncompliance); "hidden" inflation; etc), which makes the people more suspicious of government -- and provides a foundation for neocon anti-government propaganda.