So You Still Think Bush

The Liberal Patriot

So You Still Think Bush’s GOP is Conservative? Sucker…..

J.G. Schwam - December 6, 2003

In order to justify a statement that characterizes Bush’s GOP as conservative you will just have to forget putting “fiscal” any where near “conservative” in the G.W. Bush lexicon. Bush’s brand of fiscal lunacy’s got his good old conservative buddies in Congress and on M Street spinning in their high back leather chairs.

Just one week after Joshua Bolten, the president's budget director, told Congress that the current deficit was "manageable if we continue pro-growth economic policies and exercise serious spending discipline”, Bush’s compliant Congress passes the wildly unrestrained corporate giveback spending attached to HR1, the so called Medicare reform and prescription drug bill.

This generous giveback, promised by Bush to big drug companies and HMO’s come back to back on the already immense deficits left in the wake of the long term costs of his tax cuts. While official cost estimates end in the 2013 fiscal year, the best estimates, though highly speculative, are that the lower revenues from three years of Bush tax cuts in the following 10 fiscal years, 2014 through 2023, could total $3 trillion, coupled with escalating costs of the prescription drug benefit under Medicare could cost the government as much as $1.5 trillion in those years. The missing conservative punch in the package would have been cost controls; that is if they were conservative any more.

Further indications that the drug benefit will come back to haunt us can be heard in GOP dissenter, Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) words. Last Sunday, Nickles said in a speech on the Senate floor that the drug benefit was "not sustainable in its present form" and would "just accelerate the day" when the whole Medicare program collapsed.

The illogic of the program is not even lost on Senator Trent Lott (R-MS), not know for his great fiscal sensibilities, Lott said yesterday that fiscal discipline "is a problem for Republicans that we're going to have to think about, we're going to have to address in the next two or three years." "I do think the president is going to have to put down some stronger markers — in terms of authorization of costs. He is going to have to control the appropriations spending process," Mr. Lott said. "There's going to be some fiscal restraint that's going to be required. It's got to be led by the president. I hope he'll do that." One only need wonder who is Bush listening to if not his own Senate.

The GOP has not however taken their eye off the prize, crony tax cuts. They insert them everywhere. Last week the House Republicans voted to extend the corporate tax breaks once billed as temporary stimulus but now offered as help out small manufacturing companies decimated by the flight of their larger customers offshore. How about stemming this tide instead of offering these business men petty, short term buyoffs? There's a tax cut in the Medicare prescription drug bill, which passed last week, and an even larger one in the energy bill, which is currently stalled in the Senate.

Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan watchdog organization that favors restraining the budget deficit said, "In fiscal terms, there is no doubt in my mind that this has been the most irresponsible year ever."

A short look all of these wild numbers and one can just see your good old conservative grand dad spinning in his grave. Goldman Sachs’s economist Ed McKelvey sums it all up by simply saying "the U.S. federal budget is out of control."

Still not sure Bush isn’t conservative, even the official estimates are that the Medicare bill will cost $400 billion over the next 10 years look foolishly irresponsible on top the tax cuts approved in May. These cuts lower revenue by $300 billion over a shorter period. If the energy bill backed by the Bush administration becomes law, that would add another $23 billion in tax cuts, bringing the total to $723 billion in lost revenue to the federal treasury.

Many Bush administration officials are shocked or flabbergasted at the unprecedented spending of this white house. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Bush staffer who is now director of the Congressional Budget Office, said, bringing the deficit down to some $250 billion in the next five years "is going to be very hard to do". He implied he believes this is true even if the economic recovery remains strong and unemployment falls sharply. Holtz-Eakin further said, "The thing I would caution is that economic growth is not going to be enough" to solve the fiscal problem.

Bush GOP even scares one of his primary neo-conservative brain trusts, the Heritage Foundation. Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst there said, “the spending increases are largely a result of a need to strengthen the military and protect against terrorism at home, most of the new spending since 2001, 55 percent, has gone to programs with no link to national security”.

"The Republican Party," Reidel said, "has grown addicted to federal spending as a means to re-election." For all of 2004, the government projects a $475 billion deficit.

"The long-run budget picture continues to look poor," said Augustine Faucher, an economist for Economy.com. "Even if the budget picture improves over the next few years as the economy strengthens, the United States is expected to run large federal deficits over the long run."

So what’s that you said, about the being about GOP conservative values…Sucker?

References

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B5A879DB5-5814-4165-9986-2FBBAF514B2D%7D&siteid=google&dist=google

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/11/25/MNG4339SFS1.DTL

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20031201-123728-1118r.htm

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/7876089p-8815114c.html

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/25/MNG4339SFS1.DTL

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/politics/campaigns/29BUSH.html

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