I was going to rant about the Bush budget, and how full of misrepresentations and bad assumptions and failures to make tough choices it is. Then I realized that there isn’t enough time in the day for me to cover all that ground. So let me just point out that we all have extremely rotten luck to have such a merrily profligate president at this moment in history — one whose fixation on a lopsided tax-cutting agenda has rendered him entirely indifferent to the way he is mortgaging the nation’s future.
“We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations,” Bush told us in his State of the Union. Sounded good. Only that’s precisely what his budget does. In simultaneously boosting spending and cutting taxes, Bush is putting our economy into the same train-wreck mode that we last experienced in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s “We can fight Vietnam and have a Great Society” spending spree. It took two decades to clean up that mess.
For the past 20 years or so, observers who’ve taken the long view have pointed out that we are sitting on two demographic time bombs. When the baby-boom generation retires, we will face a federal budget crisis like we’ve never seen before. Bush’s father (“Bush 41”) and Bill Clinton both put the government on a course to begin to deal with that problem by raising taxes, and sure enough by the end of Clinton’s term we had a growing budget surplus. The Social Security problem hadn’t been solved, but it looked like the government would have some of the tools it needs to handle it. Health care costs are the other time bomb; Clinton’s good-faith effort to deal with that crashed and burned, and Bush seems unwilling to open the necessary discussion on how to fix the broken system we’re left with.
So now we have deficits as far as the eye can see, and a president who thinks it’s more important to eliminate the taxes the rich pay on stock dividends than to keep the government in the black. When Social Security and Medicare start to founder — right about when people currently in their 40s start to retire — we’ll know who to thank. Unless, of course, someone who follows Bush in the White House has the backbone to raise taxes and undo Bush’s current mayhem — just as Bush’s father and Clinton had to undo Reagan’s.
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