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Budget Madness
Saturday, 2005 February 12 - 3:44 pm
I think Bush has gone nuts.

When college basketball playoffs begin in March, the sports media calls it "March Madness". Back when I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, my dorm-mates and I thought this was pretty corny. We took to labeling everything with the "Madness" tag. One of the guys living on our hall had eyeballs that didn't quite line up straight; we told him he had Eyeball Madness.

But some of what Bush is proposing for the budget is really madness. It's Budget Madness.

I've written before about the difficulties of balancing the federal budget. I mean, right now, we're in a real fiscal mess, and don't let anyone let you believe otherwise. The projected budget deficit is again the highest in history, and that's without counting the mammoth costs of Bush's proposed Social Security changes, or the war in Iraq. We are bleeding red ink. But we still want to keep cutting taxes. Yeah, that makes so much sense.

So now Bush wants to put on an air of fiscal responsibility by proposing budget cuts. Here are some of the highlights of Bush's plan:

Cut funding for state and local homeland security. I guess fighting the "war on terror" means securing oil fields in Iraq, not neighborhoods here at home.

Cut funding for airport maintenance. Bush's suggestion is that increased airport fees will make up the difference... in effect, a hidden TAX on air travelers.

Cut funding for job training. This one I find galling, after Bush campaigned (in places like Ohio) on promises to retrain workers for the new economy.

Cut funding for education. Bush is proposing cuts to the Even Start literacy program and the Perkins student loan program. So much for "no child left behind"... but then again, as we all know, Bush abandoned that long time ago.


And meanwhile, Bush has created a huge entitlement program by adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. While I agree that the benefit is a good thing in principle, we have to wonder whether Bush is really trying to help the elderly, or if he's just trying to increase profits for pharmaceutical companies. The fact that he has threatened to veto any changes to the plan (like, for instance, allowing the importation of lower-cost drugs from Canada and other countries) makes me suspicious. So we're spending billions of taxpayer dollars on drugs at inflated prices, and the real beneficiaries are corporations that don't really need the welfare. WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

Maybe now that Howard Dean is the head of the Democratic party, we'll get some real yelling and screaming going on.
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Posted by Ken in: politics

Comments

Comment #1 from Jenn (Guest)
2005 Feb 14 - 9:21 am : #
I don't think that this is proof that he's gone nuts as much as it's proof that he's been nuts and been sort of hiding it until he was re-elected... Gah! So many conflicting messages!

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