For the week of February 12-18, 2003

The president’s
budget fantasies

George W. Bush’s world is surrealism where fantasy is reality.

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To the president, the North Korean nuclear menace can be handled diplomatically, but the Iraqi nuclear menace can only be handled militarily. Air quality can be saved by asking polluter industries to voluntarily not pollute. Squeezing civil liberties means freedom for Americans. Drilling for oil in the Alaska wilds is far wiser than demanding improved gasoline mileage of Detroit autos.

His most worrisome manifesto, however, is the obstinate belief that draining the national treasury’s surplus, dishing out huge tax cuts and benefits to the wealthy while creating record federal debt is the glorious road to prosperity.

Remember this promise in his State of the Union speech a month ago?

"We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and to other generations."

The reality: the Congressional Budget Office predicts that by 2008 the unprecedented national debt will be $3.8 trillion; Senate Budget Committee Democrats estimate it higher at $4.8 trillion, with interest costs of $200 billion per year for—presto!—other Congresses, other presidents and other generations to shoulder.

This audacious president also lectures Congress about "spending discipline," then breaches his own dictum with a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do demand for a 9.3 percent increase for the White House budget (to $341.2 million) while restricting the rest of government to 4.1 percent.

Worse, President Bush hasn’t leveled with Americans about the true costs of his reckless budgeting theories.

He hasn’t included probable costs of the war he anxiously wants to launch against Iraq (experts estimate war and occupation costs thereafter from $500 billion to $1 trillion), nor the costs of possible military action against North Korea, and omits the costs of Social Security and health care, whose reserves will be wiped out for baby boomers in a matter of years.

As if to further dramatize his willingness for what veteran Washington columnist David Broder describes as "burdening the future irresponsibly with debts he will not pay," Bush (president No. 43) will be the first wartime president since Lincoln—if the war on Iraq is launched—who hasn’t raised or imposed taxes to pay for it.

The closest parallel to easy-come-easy-go Bushonomic budgeting is the funny Texas bookkeeping of the president’s longtime pal and political bank-roller at Enron, Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay, who drove his high-rolling corporation into bankruptcy while telling everyone with a smile that everything was fine.

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