If this sounds melodramatic, decide for yourself. The political logic of the President's emerging budget math is clear. Start with a budget now slated to be in deficit for at least several years. Add in Bush's historically large defense hikes, which over Bush's first two years would lift the Pentagon from roughly $300 billion to $380 billion, if enacted. Finally, add needed homeland security increases of roughly $20 billion a year.
The result, on top of the tax cut, is an impenetrable fiscal vise in which no significant new initiative outside of defense or homeland security can be funded. Indeed, despite the President's lavishly "compassionate" rhetoric, many existing domestic programs outside such "entitlements" as Social Security and Medicare will be squeezed. It's a rerun of the plan David Stockman crafted for Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.
But with an unhappier ending. In ordinary times such a plan might seem reversible down the road. But less than 10 years remain before the baby boomers' retirement will drain away all the cash and political energy to do anything but cope with their colossal health and pension costs.
In other words, if you think its hard now to get a discussion going about the 40 million Americans who lack health insurance, the 15 million who dwell in poverty despite living in families headed by full-time workers, or the 10 million poor children whose lives are being blighted by dysfunctional urban school systems, then as we close in on 2010 it will be next to impossible.
These and other affronts to American ideals take federal cash to help fix. And that's not counting the crying (and costly) need to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare, to bolster Social Security, and more all things the President shrewdly claims to support, but which his budget will not honestly fund.
