[Mb-civic] Fiscal Policy: Why 'Stupid' Fits - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Fiscal Policy: Why 'Stupid' Fits

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, September 23, 2005; Page A23

Hurricane Rita heads inexorably westward, threatening to add to the 
human and financial costs of Hurricane Katrina. And when it comes to 
taxes and spending, Washington acts as if nothing is happening.

True, a group of very conservative Republicans issued a list of program 
cuts on Wednesday under the imposing name "Operation Offset." The cuts 
that the Republican Study Committee proposed have won their sponsors 
praise for making "tough choices." Of course the sponsors won't actually 
have to live with these cuts, because Republican leaders dismissed most 
of the reductions, especially in congressional pet projects and the 
Medicare prescription drug benefit.

And it's hard to give the fiscal conservatives too much credit, since 
they would cut $80 billion from Medicare and $50 billion from Medicaid 
over five years and suggest reductions in school lunches, rent subsidies 
for the poor and foreign aid, among other things. The idea seems to be 
that to help Katrina's poor and suffering victims, other poor and 
suffering people will have to sacrifice.

Nonetheless, permit me to offer a little cheap grace on these 
conservatives. At least the Operation Offset crowd has produced this 
list of cuts and forced its own leaders to disown them. The exchange 
showed how fundamentally stupid our budget policies have been over the 
past five years -- and, yes, I'll defend that strong word.

Here's a fact getting far too little attention: The cost this year alone 
of the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 comes to $225 billion. In 
other words, the revenue lost because of tax cuts going through this 
year without any congressional action would more than pay the costs of 
Katrina recovery.

Why describe our government's fiscal policies as "stupid," rather than, 
say, "ill-advised" or "misguided"? The softer words of conventional 
opinion writing imply disagreement but suggest an honest coherence in 
the other side's view. Hey, we all disagree on stuff, right?

But our current budget policies are built not on honest coherence but on 
incoherence or, even worse, a dishonest coherence. The president and 
members of Congress always insist that they are fiscal conservatives who 
believe in balanced budgets. Yet their actions bear no relationship to 
their words, and labels such as "conservative" have no connection to 
their policies. Our federal purse strings are in the hands of fiscal radic

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/22/AR2005092202255.html
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