Truthdig.com
Tuesday 05 February 2008
Curb your enthusiasm. Even if your favored candidate did well on Super Tuesday, ask yourself if he or she will seriously challenge the bloated military budget that President Bush has proposed for 2009. If not, military spending will rise to a level exceeding any other year since the end of World War II, and there will be precious little left over to improve education and medical research, fight poverty, protect the environment or do anything else a decent person might care about. You cannot spend well over $700 billion on "national security," running what the White House predicts will be more than $400 billion in annual deficits for the next two years, and yet find the money to improve the quality of life on the home front.
The conventional wisdom espoused by the mass media is that Bush's budget is a lame-duck DOA contrivance, but that assumption is wrong. The 9/11 attacks have been shamefully exploited by the military-industrial complex with bipartisan support to ramp up military expenditures beyond Cold War levels. This irrational spending spree, which accounts for more than half of all federal discretionary spending, is not likely to end with Bush's departure. Which one of the likely winners from either party would lead the battle to cut the military budget, and where would the winner find support in Congress? Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have treated the military budget as sacrosanct with their Senate votes and their campaign rhetoric. Clinton is particularly clear on the record as favoring spending more, not less, on the military.
John McCain, who previously distinguished himself as a deficit hawk and was almost in a class by himself in taking on the rapacious defense contractors, has thrown in the towel with his inane support for staying in Iraq till "victory," even if it should take a century. It is simply illogical to call for fiscal restraint while committing to an open-ended war in Iraq that has already cost upward of $700 billion. Bush's request for $515.4 billion for the Defense Department doesn't even include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which accounted for nearly $200 billion over the last budget year and which will cost at least $140 billion in 2009. Add to those numbers $17.1 billion for the Department of Energy's weapons program and over $40 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and other national security initiatives spread throughout the federal government, and you'll see that my $700-billion figure underestimates the hemorrhaging.
McCain knows, and has frequently stated as a Senate watchdog, that much of the military spending is wastefully superfluous for combating terrorists who lack any but the most rudimentary weapons. Bush totally betrayed his campaign 2000 promise to reshape the post-Cold War U.S. military when he seized upon the 9/11 attack as an opportunity to reverse the "peace dividend" that his father had begun to return to taxpayers. Instead, Bush II ushered in the most profligate underwriting of weapons systems that are grotesquely irrelevant for combating terrorism.
The U.S. already spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military, without a sophisticated enemy in sight. The Bush budget cuts not a single weapons system, including the most expensive ones, those designed to combat a Soviet military that no longer exists. Those sophisticated weapons have nothing to do with combating terrorism and everything to do with jobs and profits that motivate both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is not known whether Osama bin Laden even possesses a rowboat in his naval arsenal, but that won't stop Joe Lieberman from pushing, as is his habit, for an increase in the defense budget to double the funding for the $3.4-billion submarines built in his home state of Connecticut. Nor does the collapse of the old Soviet Union—and with it the need for enormously expensive stealth aircraft to evade radar systems the Soviets never built—dissuade congressional supporters of those planes from pushing for more, not less, than Bush is requesting. Nor does wasting an additional $8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense have anything to do with stopping terrorists from smuggling a suitcase nuke into this country.
The centerpiece of the Bush legacy is a "war on terror" based on a vast disconnect between military expenditures and actual national security requirements that the presidential candidates all fully understand. The question is whether the voters and media will force them to face that contradiction or whether we're in for more of the same—no matter how much the candidates go on about change.
Lame-Duck Budget
The New York Times | Editorial
Tuesday 05 February 2008
President Bush's 2009 budget is a grim guided tour through his misplaced priorities, failed fiscal policies and the disastrous legacy that he will leave for the next president. And even that requires you to accept the White House's optimistic accounting, which seven years of experience tells us would be foolish in the extreme.
With Mr. Bush on his way out the door and the Democrats in charge of Congress, it is not clear how many of the president's priorities, unveiled on Monday, will survive. Among its many wrongheaded ideas, the budget includes some $2 billion to ratchet up enforcement-heavy immigration policies and billions more for a defense against ballistic missiles that show no signs of working.
What will definitely outlast Mr. Bush for years to come are big deficits, a military so battered by the Iraq war that it will take hundreds of billions of dollars to repair it and stunted social programs that have been squeezed to pay for Mr. Bush's misguided military adventure and his misguided tax cuts for the wealthy.
The president claimed on Monday that his plan would put the country on the path to balancing the budget by 2012. That is nonsense. His own proposal projects a $410 billion deficit for 2008 and a $407 billion deficit next year. Even more disingenuous, Mr. Bush's projection for a balanced budget in 2012 assumes only partial funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2009, and no such spending — zero — starting in 2010.
It also assumes that there will be no long-running relief from the alternative minimum tax — which would be ruinous for the middle class — and that there will be deep cuts in Medicare and other health care spending that have proved to be politically impossible to enact.
Mr. Bush, of course, inherited a surplus from the Clinton administration, which he quickly used up on his tax cuts. He then continued cutting taxes after the surpluses were gone and even after launching the war in Iraq — $600 billion and counting. Mr. Bush remains unrepentant. Even now, with the economy — and revenues — slowing, he is pushing to make those tax cuts permanent. That would be fiscally catastrophic.
The big winner, predictably, is the Pentagon. After adjusting for inflation, the proposed defense budget of $515.4 billion — which does not include either war spending or the cost of nuclear weapons — would be up by more than 30 percent since Mr. Bush took office and would be the highest level of military spending since World War II.
Mr. Bush's war of choice in Iraq, on top of the war of necessity in Afghanistan, has seriously strained the American military — its people and its equipment. Even a new president committed to a swift withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will have to keep asking for large Pentagon budgets, both to repair that damage and to prepare the country to face what will continue to be a very dangerous world.
What is so infuriating about this budget is there is not even a hint of the need for real trade-offs. As far as anyone can tell, not a single weapons system would be canceled. That means it will be up to Congress — also far too captive to military-industry lobbyists — to start scaling back or canceling expensive programs that don't meet today's threats, or tomorrow's.
There is one place we're delighted to see Mr. Bush invest more money: a proposal to hire 1,100 new diplomats. The next president will need all of the diplomatic help he or she can get to contain the many international disasters Mr. Bush will leave behind.
Predictably, the big losers in Mr. Bush's budget are domestic-spending programs — including medical research, environmental protection and education — which will either be held flat or cut.
Even more predictably, most of Mr. Bush's touted savings would come from programs intended to protect the country's most vulnerable citizens: the elderly, the poor and the disabled. The budget would sharply restrain the growth of spending on the huge Medicare health insurance program, in an effort to save some $178 billion over the next five years. The administration would achieve that primarily by cutting the annual increases in payments to hospitals, nursing homes and other health care providers that are designed to keep up with the rising costs of caring for Medicare beneficiaries.
There is clearly room to restrain the rate of growth in some of these payments. But the size and duration of the cuts are irresponsible. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush — who insists that every answer to the country's health care woes can be found in the private sector — has left largely untouched the big subsidies that prop up the private Medicare Advantage insurance plans. Eliminating these unjustified subsidies could save Medicare more than $50 billion over five years and $150 billion over 10 years.
Just as the nation seems on the edge of a recession, the budget would also shave federal contributions to state Medicaid programs by some $17 billion over five years. That is exactly the wrong direction to go in tough economic times, when low-income workers who lose their jobs need Medicaid coverage and states have fewer funds to supply it.
All of this means that Mr. Bush will leave his successor a daunting list of problems: the ever-rising cost of health care, the tens of millions of uninsured, a military that is desperately in need of rebuilding. Thanks to Mr. Bush's profligate ways, it also means that the next president will have even less money for solving them.
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