I Want to Save a Child's Sight!

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Budget Fictions

I rarely do this, because I don't like to just copy and paste, but this editorial from the NYT was just too good to pass up:

"When it comes to President Bush's new budget plan, what you don't know will hurt you."

"Mr. Bush's spending and taxing proposals are a mass of missing information. The cost of keeping the military in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't included. Neither, as it turns out, are the usual projections of the long-term effects of proposals to cut $183 billion from domestic programs other than entitlements."

"The administration's obfuscation is, however, being deciphered by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an independent watchdog organization. Specialists backtracked through tables of opaque data and deduced the following: Over five years, veterans' benefits would be cut 13 percent, or $10 billion. Despite all the political talk about energy research and alternate fuels, $4.4 billion would be cut from energy programs. Environmental spending, including for national parks, would be cut 22 percent, or $28 billion; housing, fuel, child care and nutrition programs for the poor and elderly would lose 13 percent, or $24 billion. Topping this surreal concoction is a 13 percent cut — $53 billion — in education and job programs by 2011."

"Political realists have already declared the budget dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. That's not enough. The administration's assault on domestic programs should stand as a permanent reminder of the folly of the $285 billion in additional upper-bracket tax cuts the president and the Republican-controlled Congress are aiming for across the next five years. Despite the budget fictions, the damage from the tax-cut mania will haunt future generations." [NYT]

Just take a look at what this budget is, a give-away to his rich corporate buddies and donors, and a screw-the-poor initiative. He comes to Milwaukee touting "alternative energy" and then with the other hand cuts support for it. $53 billion in cuts to education and job programs over the next five years! Has this man no soul? Or did he lose it in a game of poker when he was all coked up?

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