The Spender

It's become a matter of faith in certain circles that Bush is Fiscal Responsibility's enemy No. 1 (My God, he's even lending the UN money! The filthy unilateralist!). I'm beginning to wonder if that charge is inflated, or at any rate, misplaced. Over the weekend, Bush sent a $2.4 billion budget to Congress that cuts spending in 7 of the 15 Cabinet departments. You can charge him with tokenism if you want to, but he's still cutting spending. Show me any of the Democratic candidates who plan to balance the budget by cutting domestic spending. All of them want to cut military spending and raise taxes (or "remove the fiscally irresponsible Bush tax cut" if you believe wording it thus means the affected taxpayer won't be giving more money to the government than currenty). So it would seem that the President is making fiscal priorities that are at least arguably conservative.


Next point: it's become a safer bet than the Super Bowl that the budget Congress will send to the President will be bigger than the one Bush has proposed. No one's even suggesting that Congress will pass a $2 billion or less budget. It is, after all, an election year. So we have a situation where the President proposes a budget that is probably too big, the Congress passes a budget that is going to be bigger still, and Congressional leaders blame the President. This is akin to an employee blaming his taking money from the till on the fact that the store owner doesn't balance his checkbook properly.


Finally, Tom Daschle said something very illuminating (and I will even grant that he meant to do so, though perhaps not in the way he intended). "We could eliminate all of our defense spending and discretionary spending and still have a deficit of over $100 billion," said Daschle. And he's right. So what's the solution, Tom? If cutting the defense spending, and cutting the discretionary spending won't make the nut, what spending should we cut?