Bush pushes for budget restraint
US President George W Bush has said his forthcoming budget plans will seek to curb domestic spending.
“Cutting the deficit during a time of war requires us to restrain spending in other areas,” Mr Bush said in his weekly radio address…
He said his plans for the next fiscal year would show that his aim of erasing the deficit by 2012 could be achieved without giving up tax cuts…
Mr Bush said the budget for the year starting in October 2007 would underline the need to tighten spending on domestic programmes - including on education, energy and health…
Meanwhile military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan would increase.
“Unless we act, we will saddle our children and grandchildren with tens of thousands of unfunded obligations,” Mr Bush said.
You reckon?
Apparently it’s drown-it-in-a-bathtub time already.
I think it’s fairly well accepted in the environmental community that, while it’s certainly important to ask individuals to cut down on pollution by driving less in higher mileage cars and recycling their newspapers, that will only ever be a drop in the bucket compared to the gains that can be had if industrial polluters make sacrifices. The politics of scale.
There’s a parallel here. “Unless we act…” We certainly must act. But where is it written that the only sacrifices a budget must ever make is in domestic spending? It’s as though Bush’s hands are tied. “Well, I can’t rescind the tax cuts, and I can’t lower military spending, so what am I gonna do? You keep asking me to balance the budget! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”
There’s a common-sense conclusion about social programs that seems to escape conservatives: While it’s true that shitty social programs are a tax liability, well-funded social programs are a tax savings. That is, if one takes the conservative view that tax dollars are ours (individually), and not the fee we rightfully pay for the privilege of living in our particular society. Hence, any tax payment which gets us something cheaper than we would get it in the market is a tax savings.
“But wait,” you say. “Nothing taxes ever get is cheaper than in the market; it just shifts the burden of payment to others. That’s a pretty selfish outlook.” Well, first of all, there’s some evidence that, in fact, some government programs - the well-run, well-funded ones - do, in fact, cost less in total dollars. Social Security, for example. In those cases, cutting social programs is a net loss. But no matter how many times that evidence is cited, it bounces right off of small-government conservatives, so let me go to the other point:
The fact is that the budget is all about selfishness.
It’s just that the only people who recognize it are the top 5%. They’ve somehow convinced run-of-the-mill conservatives that the tax cuts and benefit cuts are all about rugged individualism. They’re not. Conservative policy-makers and their donors don’t care about you keeping your money.
Which is why benefit cuts are such a bad idea. Now, if Bush was arguing that ‘X,Y, and Z systems are broken and we need to fix them’, that’d be one thing. Saving money by not wasting it is a bipartisan issue. Unless your name is Ted Stevens.
But that’s not what Bush is arguing. He’s laid it all out: Erase programs, not tax cuts. Balancing the budget will require sacrifice. But only by you.
But back to the environmentalism analogy: Very little can be gained by taking away more from the lower 95% of individuals. But not MUCH more can be gained by taking away from the top 5%. Focusing on individuals is like fixing global warming by outlawing refrigerators. The industrial polluters in this analogy are the architects of a failed policy which is costing us $255 million a day. And, just like polluters, they complain that we aren’t thinking of their employees when we make suggestions like this. “Cut our funding, and desert the troops!” they say.
No thought to cutting profits. Even their belt-tightening is top-down.
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Bush pushes for budget restraint.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAH! AHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAH!
Oh that is rich!!!
And there are people who say he’s not really stupid, he just plays a stupid person on TV.
Right on time.
6 years of pork-barrel orgies, and now that the opposition is in control of the purse strings, it’s up to them to show “responsibility” by cutting the budget and leaving in his tax cut gifts.
What they’re taking away the tax cuts! Those meanies! If only they’d listened to what I said, we’d have a balanced budget.
Oink.
UNFUNDED MANDATE UNFUNDED MANDATE UNFUNDED MANDATE
(We were discussing NCLB, right?)
I wonder if conservatives can still rely on the myth that there’s a large budget of non-military discretionary spending relative to the overall budget (and deficit) that can be cut to balance the budget without increasing revenue or cutting mandatory entitlements, military spending, or debt service payments.
I wonder if conservatives can still rely on the myth that there’s a large budget of non-military discretionary spending relative to the overall budget (and deficit) that can be cut to balance the budget without increasing revenue or cutting mandatory entitlements, military spending, or debt service payments.
You wanna know just how out of whack the wingnuts are when it comes to budgets? Read this comment and then the one two below it. This is what passes for wisdom on the Right Blogosphere…
Nancy Pelosi can simply ignore Bush’s budget proposals, right?
My thanks to the Philistine in a time of Israelites for the link.
One of the things to which conservatives object is the way federal money is spent for local projects. In my own, mostly rural, county, were looking for $809,774 of federal money for all sorts of thoroughly local projects: resurfacing streets, refurbishing municipal government buildings, fixing old water lines and the like. Even if you argue that all of those projects are necessary, how is it efficient to send tax money all the way to Washington, DC, to the most expensive bureaucracy in the country, just so it can be sent back to Lower Towamensing Township for playground equipment?
Spending decisions are being taken at entirely the wrong level. Would the township spend $44,000 on playground equipment for a park if it had to raise the money itself?
We’ve all heard of Alaska’s bridge to nowhere, which was easy to get through because the people who wanted to spend the money weren’t the people who had to raise the money; it was just “federa; money,” meaning everybody’s money, which might as well mean nobody’s money.
You look through federal spending and you find all sorts of appropriations for bike paths in Massachusetts and repairs to local streets; we have our Congressmen taking decisions on local projects, and we have decisions being taken so far from local needs or wants as to be totally divorced from any sort of knowledge of needs or assumption of responsibilities.
The federal gasoline and diesel excise taxes go to Washington, but federal law requires that 90.5¢ out of every dollar raised must be spent in the state in which it was raised, and there were efforts to increase that to 92¢. If that’s the case, why send it to Washington at all? Leave it in the states, and let the state legislatures, which are closer to the people and more responsible to the people, decide what taxes ought to be levied and where money ought to be spent.
SEPTA, the public transit authority in the Philadelphia metro area, was running a big deficit, and rather than do anything radical like raise fares and having the people who use SEPTA pay for SEPTA, the city appealled to the state. Governor Ed Rendell then took a half-billion dollar federal grant (returned highway funds) and used part of it, on his own authority, without the need for the legislature to act, to bail out SEPTA. Even if you think that the public tax dollars ought to subsidize people’s bus tickets (and I certainly do not; the government should not be subsidizing individuals), surely you ought to be appalled that this money was simply spent by the governor without the first bit of appropriations legislation or control.
Meanwhile military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan would increase.
Jesus loves the BBC, and so do I. The above sentence is the sort of thing that real news outlets include in their stories. We’re looking at a proposal for what, $250 billion more for Irag and Afghanistan, while Republican Congressmen bitch about spending a fraction of that on implementing all the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations? And then we have some twat being a whiny-ass-titty-baby about bus tickets for individuals? Dear God, low-income urban filth are getiing subsidized bus fares. How will the Commonwealth, or the Republic itself, survive?
Mds, if you live anywhere around Philadelphia, try driving to the SEPTA train station by the Villanova Law School, where you’ll have the pleasure of seeing the wealthy folks from Lower Merion parking their Beamers to ride the train into posh offices in Center City — with their subsidized fares.
By the way MDS, even though I approve of the war against the Islamists, I wrote, shortly after the election that we ought to just get out now, since that’s what the people voted for. I don’t support spending a quarter trillion on the war in Iraq if the public don’t support it.
This shouldn’t be particularly difficult: businesses serve their customers and their managers/stockholders; governments serve their constituents. So government programs can be more efficient overall in any situation where a business can make a profit by getting someone else to bear some of its costs, or where businesses can charge extra to a captive audience.
Health care is the most obvious example for this: insurance companies can make more money if they get rid of sicker clients and delay or refuse payment for legitimate claims whenever they can. Overall cost goes way up, but since that cost isn’t being paid by the insurance companies, their shareholders are happy. And their customers are unhappy but effectively captive.
Education is another. Private schools do best when they can confer a comparative advantage, i.e. people who go to some particular school will have better careers than people who don’t. But that outcome requires a lot of people getting really bad educations so that the ones with good educations can shine brighter. Good for the private sector, lousy for the country as a whole.
Omigod, it’s even worse than I thought: wealthy people also benefit from a public service! They only have to pay $56.50 a month more for their TrailPasses than those in Zone 1 or closer. Dammit, they should be more strongly encouraged to drive those BMWs the rest of the way downtown. (Funny, though, how your initial screed disapproved of subsidizing tickets for anyone, not just the wealthy.) And imagine the nerve, spending highway money on mass transit instead. Impeachment is too good for that governor.
Okay, I’d have to run to the store to get more troll food, and it’s too cold out.
The federal gasoline and diesel excise taxes go to Washington, but federal law requires that 90.5¢ out of every dollar raised must be spent in the state in which it was raised, and there were efforts to increase that to 92¢. If that’s the case, why send it to Washington at all? Leave it in the states, and let the state legislatures, which are closer to the people and more responsible to the people, decide what taxes ought to be levied and where money ought to be spent.
Because there was a war fought a little while back that decided that the United States was, in fact, a country and not a bunch of independent states sharing a continent.
But I’m all for your idea. The prospect of the USA balkanizing and being aunable to spend any significant amount on foreign adventures doesn’t bother me at all.
DANA FOR PRESIDENT!
Jesus loves the BBC, and so do I. The above sentence is the sort of thing that real news outlets include in their stories. We’re looking at a proposal for what, $250 billion more for Irag and Afghanistan, while Republican Congressmen bitch about spending a fraction of that on implementing all the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations?
As Ezra suggests, this low low figure is financial chicanery. Expect to bleed red for a while.
I’m all in favor of fiscal responsibility. Let’s start by voting down the $250 billion needed for the “surge” in Iraq and/or any war with Iran. Then let’s bring our troops home from Iraq and stop spending money on a fruitless war. That should cut some spending right off.
Then we can reverse those tax cuts for the wealthy and get some needed revenue back. Suddenly, hey! I guess we won’t be in the red so badly.