- AUSTIN, Texas -- I feel snakebite
about praising any proposal by George W. Bush. Every time I write a column
saying, "Look, he's done something good!" he does something else
that makes it either not so good or just plain bad. He welched on his deal
with Ted Kennedy in the Lots of Children Left Behind Act, now underfunded
by $12 billion. And nobody has ever seen that $15 billion he promised to
fight AIDS in Africa.
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- The hideous Medicare prescription drug benefit, perhaps
the most obscenely deformed legislation I've ever seen written, in addition
to being a mother lode for the drug companies now turns out not to cost
the promised $400 billion over 10 years but a whopping $1.2 trillion. (For
those of you who are fans of the Department of Great Big Numbers, the administration
is now estimating there will be "offsets" to the prescription
drug fiasco that will reduce the $1.2 trillion to a mere $720 billion.
Remember when they tried to fire that whistleblower who said it would cost
at least $530 billion? And don't count on those offsets. These folks have
remarkable imaginations -- they're counting as certain revenue $1 billion
from oil drilling in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), something
Congress has rejected for the last four years.)
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- All that said, I did find a good idea in Bush's budget
-- putting a lower cap on farm subsidies. Three-fourths of federal crop
subsidies go to the wealthiest 10 percent of agriculture businesses. This
is not a red state-blue state issue. Two-thirds of American farms -- those
run by families and small operators -- do not qualify for subsidies at
all. For years, agribusiness has successfully hidden behind the sacred
shield of "the family farmer," who is still getting screwed.
It's a monumental rip-off, made worse by a loophole that has allowed some
huge agribusiness firms to collect millions of dollars a year by disguising
themselves as several corporations. Farm conservation programs make much
more sense and do benefit family farmers.
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- And that said, what a sham, what a rotten, phony, fake
document this 2006 budget is.
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- In the first place, they're trying to fool you into thinking
the deficit is less than it is by using a fake number from the previous
year -- an early deficit estimate set way high so they could claim the
deficit had been "dramatically reduced." Last year's actual deficit
was $412 billion, the largest ever, and under Bush's budget this year,
it will be $427 billion. The actual deficit, with war spending included,
would balloon to $1.4 trillion by 2010 under this plan.
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- In the second place, the budget contains none of the
expenses for the war in Iraq or Bush's plan for Social Security, presumably
in place by then.
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- Third, the values reflected in this budget are deformed.
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- The cuts take away from schools in need, child-care assistance,
environmental programs (a whopping 10.4 percent cut there), students (he
lied about Pell Grants), veterans, Medicaid, food stamps -- basically the
weakest and the poorest Americans. The money goes overwhelmingly to the
richest Americans, who would get the permanent tax cuts, and to the Department
of Defense, the monster.
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- According to this budget, Defense gets a 4.8 percent
increase, bad enough (again, this is without counting Iraq). But as William
Saleton explains in an article on Slate.com, what Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
has done is to hide at least $40 billion in normal defense expenditures
in the supplementary appropriation that will have to be passed for the
war in Iraq.
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- When if he asked if he was hiding regular spending in
the emergency wartime bill, Rumsfeld said: "That would be wrong, and
we wouldn't do that. It's all right out in the open." Whereupon the
press laughed merrily. Saleton estimates it's a 10 percent increase, without
Iraq. Others put it even higher. Ha, ha, ha.
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- Hubert Humphrey said, "The moral test of government
is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children;
those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in
the shadows of life -- the sick, the needy, the handicapped." Bush
seems to think they're all targets.
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- I'm a great believer in put up or shut up, so here's
where I'd get the money to pay for those programs. Don't make the tax cuts
permanent -- they do go disproportionately to the very richest people in
this country, it's gross. And stop the two new tax cuts that go only to
the very, very rich. Don't put another nickel, not to mention another $9.7
billion, into that ridiculous boondoggle, Star Wars. Track down the $8.8
billion the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction now says is effectively
unaccounted for because of "severe inefficiencies and poor management."
The scathing report also says lack of oversight opened the funds to corruption.
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- Oh, and if Congress would like to retain the power of
the purse, I suggest it look very closely at the fine print in this doozy.
It proposes biennial budgeting and appropriations (of course, not in election
years), automatic appropriations, a presidential veto on the joint budget
resolution (Congress' planning document for appropriations) and much, much
more.
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- - Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly
The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including
Who Let the Dogs In?
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- (c) 2005 Creators Syndicate
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- http://www.workingforchange.com/
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