The Chicago Tribune reports:
The biggest news of the record $3-trillion-plus federal budget that President Bush plans to propose to Congress on Monday may be the potential deficit that comes with it.
After years of White House boasting that it is getting the deficit under control – cutting it by $250 billion during the past two years – the administration appears ready to concede that the deficit will rise to $400 billion or more in the coming year. That’s a near-return to the record $413-billion deficit reached in 2004.
The deficit had come down to $163 billion, the Office of Management and Budget recently reported – with a projection that the U.S. should see a surplus in revenue by the year 2012.
But the combination of a slowing economy and the new economic stimulus that Congress and the president are pursuing – with about $150 billion in tax relief promised this spring, could be reversing the trend.
As usual, Bush will propose a significant increase in defense spending this year, as he has from the start, the Washington Post is reporting, and he will seek to slow the growth of “entitlement’’ spending such as Medicare, but he will have to concede that the deficit for 2008 and 2009 is on the rise again.
The president, who refrained from vetoing any spending bills when Republicans ran Congress, also is wielding the veto pen with a new vengeance now that Democrats are in control – promising to veto any spending bill that doesn’t cut the “earmarks’’ that members of Congress like to send home in half.
Some, such as Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, are not convinced by the president’s newfound approach to restraint in spending.
“I see no credibility to the notion that, after the equivalent of six years of binge drinking, now there is this enormous guilt and desire to make up for it at this moment,’’ Ornstein has told the Tribune.
The legacy of Bush’s spending record will be long-lasting, analysts say. The accumulated national debt – $5.77 trillion near the end of Bush’s first year in office – now stands at $9 trillion.
The White House already has estimated, before the new budget plan for 2009 that it spells out on Monday, that it will reach $9.6 trillion by the end of Bush’s second term. The cost of paying the interest on that debt – one of the expenses which must be met each year – ran to $250 billion in 2007, nearly half of what the government spent on the Department of Defense. The debt payment had amounted to $150 billion during fiscal 2003.
The national debt had stood at $4 trillion in former President Bill Clinton’s first year in office. Clinton, benefiting from the fruits of a booming 1990s economy, left office with a balanced federal budget. The accumulated debt had grown by 44 percent during Clinton’s two terms, according to the Bush White House’s own estimates, and it will have grown by 75 percent from Bush’s first year to the first year of his successor.
The cost of the war has driven much of Bush’s spending. The president already has secured more than $600 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with “supplemental budgets’’ sought outside the parameters of the normal federal budget, and is seeking nearly $200 billion more for the year ahead.
“What we’ve seen this year is the continuation of another pattern of outright dishonesty,’’ Ornstein has said. “This has not been an effort to achieve a rational dialog about national priorities and fiscal discipline… We’ve had funding for the war drawn through the back door of supplemental and emergency spending… It’s one thing if you have an emergency, but this has been funding the traditional cost of the wars in a way that tries to disguise the spending in the eyes of the public.’’
The average annual growth in defense spending has run 5.7 percent on Bush’s watch – a greater rate than any post-World War II president achieved, the Cato Institute has found. It was down 1.7 percent a year, on average, during Clinton’s terms. Johnson, waging a war in Vietnam, had boosted it by 4.9 percent a year.
Yet this president hasn’t always paid for the war at the expense of social programs: Bush has bought guns, and butter, too. But in the balance, the share of the federal pie for the Pentagon has grown far greater than the share for domestic spending.
Defense Department has grown by more than 60 percent since the start of Bush’s presidency. Between fiscal 2002, the first year over which Bush had full control of the budget, and last year, national defense spending grew to $572 billion, up 64 percent.
Federal spending on education, training, employment and social services grew to $93.9 billion, up 33 percent.
Spending on health grew to $268.5 billion, up 36.6 percent.
Spending on natural resources and the environment grew to $35.2 billion – up 19 percent.
Transportation: $74.6 billion, up 20.7 percent.
General science, space and technology: $24.9 billion, up 19.7 percent.
At the same time, those mandatory programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have consumed growing shares of the budget, increasing by an average of 9 percent every year.
As a result, the Bush OMB reports, the percentage of all federal outlays on national defense has grown from 17.3 percent during Bush’s first full year to 20.5 percent this year. The share for “human resources’’ has slipped from 65.5 to 63.2 percent.
And within only the discretionary share of the budget which Bush and Congress can control, defense has consumed a far greater share: Growing from 47 percent in 2002 to 57 percent this year.
The Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski has analyzed the spending of Bush and his predecessors, adjusting the numbers for inflation.
Among post-World War II presidents, he has found, Bush’s discretionary spending has outpaced Johnson’s. It grew on average by 4.6 percent a year during Johnson’s presidency. During the first six years of Bush’s presidency, it grew by 5.4 percent. Even if the last year of tight restraints on discretionary spending is included, the rate of growth still averaged 5.4 percent on Bush’s watch.
“You discover that Bush was a bigger spender than Lyndon Johnson,’’ Slivinski has told us.
Just think,some in the Democratic Party like
Robert Reich think Bush hasn't been spending enough money:
After three decades of government starvation of necessary resources, the next president needs to champion progressive taxation with the proceeds invested in social outlays that make for a more productive economy.
