Bush’s Magic Budget

With its glossy book format and American flag on the cover, President Bush’s $2.1-trillion budget proposal couldn’t be better packaged. But its looks aren’t fooling anyone who can add. A national poll in Tuesday’s Times has a very clear message for Bush: A wide majority of Americans, including two-thirds of Republicans, say they support delaying tax cuts rather than tapping Social Security funds to pay for Bush’s extravaganza.

No one questions the need to run a deficit during a recession and war. But excess spending should be targeted, productive and temporary. The Bush plan, requesting $590 billion in additional tax cuts and $550 billion in new military spending over the next decade, is none of these. Some of the heavy weaponry, such as the Crusader howitzer, that the administration wants makes no sense for fighting terrorism. Nor does speeding up tax cuts or piling on personal and corporate write-offs.

The administration’s proposals for cutting spending are mean-spirited: reducing environmental and job training programs as well as more cuttable highway funds.

Worst, however, are the gimmicks that conceal the truth. The White House knows very well that Congress, in an election year and painful recession, is likely to restore funds for job training and other programs. A series of Enron-like accounting devices and overly optimistic revenue assumptions also conceal the extent of the damage.

Consider: The White House wishes away what the congressional Joint Tax Committee estimates will be several hundred billion dollars in lost revenue over the decade by wrongly assuming that Congress will not continue protecting middle-class taxpayers from having to pay the alternative minimum tax, which was meant to nail tax-sheltering millionaires. Without action, the middle-class exemption would expire in 2004.

The administration also uses the trick of phasing in tax cuts slowly so that the full bill doesn’t come due until the end of the decade, long after Bush is gone. Its estimate of Medicare costs is $300 billion less than the Congressional Budget Office’s. Flying in the face of economic reality, it predicts that costs for homeland security, education and veterans’ programs will decline after 2003. Above all, the administration totally ignores the costs of its permanent tax cuts in the decade from 2012 to 2022--trillions more will be lost at the very moment the baby boom generation is retiring.

Bush is using the war on terrorism and his still-stratospheric approval ratings to browbeat Congress, but Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and other leading Democrats have an obligation. They should not only point out the dangers in Bush’s budget plan but act: Delay tax cuts, closely inspect military spending and protect Medicare and Social Security. With the support of three-quarters of Americans, they need not surrender to the president’s reckless economic policies wrapped in anti-terrorism.