The Washington Post is certain to boil the red blood of Bush supporters with what appears to be a concerted effort to highlight the disingenuousness of the Bush budget plan. A series of articles and postings in the last two days go for the jugular.
Yesterday’s Outlook section had a commentary that suggested that the Bush administration is “Enronizing” the budget, although its first comparison is to the Boeing deal where the Air Force wanted to lease planes from the aircraft maker rather than buy them, despite the higher costs. Why? To reduce cost in the annual budget.
The president and Congress continue resorting to ever more smoke and mirrors to veil the truth about the costs and burdens that will be placed on American taxpayers. Moreover, they’re using precisely the sorts of gimmicks and tricks that we wouldn’t tolerate in the private sector.
The Boeing deal was eerily reminiscent of corporate deals using the same kinds of long-term leases for exactly the same reasons. I still carry images in my mind of that imposing Enron headquarters building in Houston that we saw on the nightly news as the Enron scandal unfolded about four years ago. Guess what? Enron acquired that building by creating a special entity solely for the purpose of purchasing the building and then leasing it back to the company. Its reasons were the same as the Air Force’s in the Boeing deal — to avoid recording the full cost of the building up front, effectively keeping the purchase “off the books.”
You’d think the embarrassment of the Boeing deal, and the lessons of Enron et al., might have compelled the administration to cease and desist from the use of such accounting tricks. But in this new budget, they’re everywhere.
Then today, an A1 story carried the headline “After Bush Leaves Office, His Budget’s Costs Balloon.”
Congress and the White House have become adept at passing legislation with hidden long-term price tags, but those huge costs began coming into view in Bush’s latest spending plan. Even if Bush succeeds in slashing the deficit in half in four years, as he has pledged, his major policy prescriptions would leave his successor with massive financial commitments that begin rising dramatically the year he relinquishes the White House, according to an analysis of new budget figures.
Bush’s extensive tax cuts, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit and, if it passes, his plan to redesign Social Security all balloon in cost several years from now. His plan to partially privatize Social Security, for instance, would cost a total of $79.5 billion in the last two budgets that Bush will propose as president and an additional $675 billion in the five years that follow. New Medicare figures likewise show the cost almost twice as high as originally estimated, largely because it mushrooms long after the Bush presidency.
Finally, Terry Neal in his Talking Points online column writes
The one-year budget deficit will be so large in the next fiscal year that if the government stopped funding everything except defense, homeland security and entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation would still be $75 billion in the red.
Put another way, if the government decided this year to eliminate every education, school lunch, public health, housing assistance, space exploration, medical research, environmental protection, highways, national parks and veterans program, it would still run a deficit in 2005.
That’s because domestic discretionary programs that aren’t associated with defense or homeland security make up only about 20 percent of the federal budget. President Bush proposes spending about $352 billion for those domestic programs this year. The estimated budget deficit is $427 billion. The difference: $75 billion.
For all of the White House crowing about holding down spending, it is clear the government is not going to be able to cut its way out of this deficit — not without making drastic cuts that would completely redefine the role of the federal government.
Oh my, how Scott McClellan must be boiling!