Does the US Budget Reflect the Best Investments for Our Future?

By Ben Cohen
The San Francisco Chronicle

Thursday 08 February 2007

The Pentagon would receive $481 billion, and that's not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Congress debates how much to spend on programs such as "education" and the "environment," lawmakers are really deciding how to carve up America's discretionary budget pie, depicted above, as proposed by President Bush on Monday. The Pentagon would receive $481 billion, and that's not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As you can see, more than half of the money Congress votes to spend this year would go to the Pentagon, leaving budget scraps for everything else.

President Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of defense, Lawrence Korb, argues that about $60 billion of the $481 billion Pentagon budget (12 percent) would be wasted on obsolete Cold War weapons such as nuclear missiles targeting the former Soviet Union, and those weapons can be junked without hurting our ability to fight terrorists.

This $60 billion could be used to do great things for our country. The Common Sense Budget Act, introduced last year by U.S. Reps. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, and Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, would recover the wasted $60 billion and invest it in, among other things, giving health insurance to the 9 million American kids who lack it, rebuilding and modernizing our nation's public schools and cutting America's oil use in half.

This small adjustment in discretionary spending would be more in keeping with the priorities of the American people who, repeated polling shows, support transferring funds wasted by the Pentagon to programs they care about - such as children and the environment. You'd think this reallocation of spending would be a no-brainer for our political leaders. Not so. The military-industrial complex's manipulation of jobs and political contributions has left even some of our most responsible political leaders paralyzed. So, despite bipartisan agreement that tens of billions of dollars are wasted annually by the Pentagon, nothing is done.

Our lawmakers need to stand up to defense contractor lobbyists and straighten out America's mixed up budget priorities.

Discretionary Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2008

In billions of dollars

$481.4 billion Defense

$58.6 Education

$52.3 Health

$43.6 Justice

$39.6 Veterans benefits

$39.5 Int'l affairs

$32.9 Housing assistance

$28.7 Natural resources and environment

$27.3 Science and space

$23.4 Transportation

$17.6 Training, employment and social services

$17.6 General government

$16.4 Other income security

$10.7 Economic development

$10.1 Social Security and medicare

$5.8 Agriculture

$4.2 Energy

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Source: Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

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Mr. Bush's Improbable Budget
The New York Times | Editorial

Thursday 08 February 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. In 2012 alone, the president's new budget would cut domestic discretionary spending by $34 billion, while tax cuts for households with incomes above $1 million would total $73 billion. In all, by 2012, 20 percent of the tax cuts would go to that richest sliver of Americans; one-third of the benefits would go to households with incomes over $400,000.

Mr. Bush's new budget has a few worthwhile nuggets, like a proposed increase in Pell grants for low-income college students and a jump in the funds for AIDS treatment worldwide. In drafting a real budget, Congress can take those items from the president's version, and jettison the rest.

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