Bush’s budget blatant baloney: cuts hurt many

By Joseph Gauger
Collegian Staff
February 14, 2007

The budget proposal presented by President George W. Bush to Congress Feb. 5 reveals a dire problem for the United States. Bush has once again presented the largest military spending appropriation in history, $481.4 billion, according to the Department of Defense’s Web site. This figure includes $163 billion to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is another indicator of how important a speedy withdrawal from Iraq is; our nation’s action there has become a permanent and onerous military and fiscal commitment.

Next year’s military budget constitutes an 11.3 percent increase over last year’s budget, according to press release from the Pentagon. This administration’s militarism is the legacy of past administrations, particularly the Clinton Administration, which chose to continue spending at Cold War levels years after the fall of the Soviet Union. History has shown military aggression is itself a cause of armed conflict – both Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were armed by the United States in the 1980s, for instance, in an effort to manipulate the balance of power in the Middle East. This is the wellspring of our two current military engagements.

If the United States is to maintain its leadership economically and militarily, it must drastically alter its priorities. A large portion of the Fiscal Year 2008 budget is devoted to re-equipping the military. This is a difficult expenditure to evaluate – certainly the Pentagon has been lax in providing proper equipment in past years, despite one of Bush’s loudest campaign promises in 2000. Our troops have too often been asked to go without in the past six years, and it is a relief to see that the Pentagon will, I hope, use this money to give the troops everything they need to operate. But it belies the precarious situation of our military that such an expenditure is necessary to maintain our standing commitments outside our borders.

Much of this money will be pledged to weapons systems that are still in development and will not be usable for years, mostly fighter planes and aerial drones. Analysis by the Congressional Budget Office shows that the amount Bush has asked for is vastly greater than the requisite funds to repair weapons lost or damaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and will be used to procure new weapons. Attempts at further militarization show that this administration has not learned from the catastrophic failure of Iraq and that they plan to continue similar operations in the future, despite the plainly egregious effect our recent military misadventures have had on global terrorism and the political situation in the Middle East.

All of this is exacerbated by the proposed cuts in domestic spending in the new budget. The FY08 budget reduces spending on Medicare, Medicaid, education and various health programs by denying their budgets’ funding to meet the growth of inflation. In the richest country in the world, and the democracy that spends less of its wealth on social programs than any other, this constitutes a theft from the people who rely on these programs. The growth of entitlement spending is worrisome, especially in the face of Bush’s history of deficit spending, but it is not untenable if the power of the American economy is turned toward meeting the needs of its citizens.

The extension of the tax cuts from Bush’s first term remains a priority in the FY08 Budget. Despite the administration’s claims of success, these cuts have not yet generated revenue sufficient to pay for itself, as evidenced by the continued deficits. Had the cuts led to prosperity across the economic spectrum, the expenses might perhaps be justifiable. Instead, they have led to the further concentration of wealth in the top tier of our economy. According to nonpartisan federal budget agents, the only hope of balancing the budget in the foreseeable future is to repeal the Bush Administration’s tax cuts. Democrats in Congress need to see past their own connections and look at the defense industry and reliance on wealthy donors and oppose the administration’s continued fiscal recklessness.

gaugerj1@lasalle.edu