The United States of Arbusto

Scripps-Howard's Mary Deibel is not shrill. Her tone in this article -- "Your wallet and Bush's second term" -- is matter-of-fact, almost clinical.

That matter-of-factness makes it all the more chilling, lending it the detached staccato of a war correspondent from the trenches of the class warfare.

The Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman takes a similar detached approach in "Analysts Call Outlook for Bush Plan Bleak." That article, under the heading "for the record," begins:

President Bush signaled [Thursday] that he would add personal investment accounts to the Social Security system, simplify the tax code without raising taxes and cut the budget deficit in half, all before he leaves office in 2009.

Ambitious as those promises are, they may be mathematically impossible, budget and policy analysts say.

If you read Weisman's entire piece, you'll realize that by "may be" he actually means "is." How does that saying go? Something like, "If you don't change direction, you're likely to end up where you're headed."

Deibel says we can expect a push to make the "temporary" tax shifts from the past three years permanent and possibly an effort to replace the income tax with something like a national sales tax. That would involve something like a 26 percent sales tax, shifting ever more of the burden onto wage-earners and away from the investor class.

And what will this mean for the deficit? Deibel quotes Mark Zandi of Economy.com -- the business page's go-to guy for summarizing the conventional wisdom:

Permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts will lead to $4 trillion worth of deficits in the next decade, warns Economy.com analyst Mark Zandi.

Zandi worries Bush and Congress lack the discipline to control the deficit and slash spending on popular programs. The upshot, he says: higher interest rates for consumers and business.

Back to Weisman to flesh out what it would mean for Bush and Congress to have the "discipline to control the deficit" solely by "slashing spending":

To cope with the cost of his agenda, Bush said he would impose "spending discipline" on Congress and spur economic growth to boost tax revenue. But he has also made it clear he would not cut defense or homeland security spending, and he has promised more spending for education.

The remaining spending at Congress's discretion -- transportation, law enforcement, veterans, agriculture, housing, health research, space exploration and national parks -- totaled $346.5 billion in 2004, not much less than the budget deficit. Eliminating all nondefense, non-homeland security spending may not be enough to balance the budget and cover the cost of the president's Social Security plan.

In other words, to accomplish even his modest goal of halving the deficit solely through "spending discipline," President Bush would have to do more than merely trim a few "popular programs" -- he would have to eliminate everything the government does aside from defense and domestic security. We're not talking about cuts at HUD or the EPA or NASA or the CDC, we're talking about cutting those agencies entirely and still not balancing the budget.

Bush is doing for America what he did for Arbusto.

Comments

[Michael E. Bowen]

Well maybe the Saudis will bail us out like they did Arbusto...

[Nate]

Wow. Eliminate all Federal non-security domestic spending at a stroke...

That's so wild, 'ambitious' would be a dull word to describe it. Kill the socialist beast once and for all. Move trillions into the private economy, stimulating growth. Free the huddled cringing masses of the USA from the jack-booted liberal government thugs, all while defending the American homeland from global Islamofascism and restoring her cultural values to the shining purity born of individual responsibility in the hard workshop of the free market.

That'd be some vision. Would make the Libertarians giddy. Think it's anything close to what Bush actually wants to do, or what will be politically achievable even with control of all branches of Federal government?

[cjmr]

A 26% national sales tax! Presumably that would be on top of whatever state and local sales taxes we're already paying? My online homeschooling acquaintances whose philosophy is "make it or grow it yourself or do without" are starting to sound more sane by the moment.

[jean]

26% national sales tax. Well. This disabled person with a (very small) fixed income just loooooves that idea. NOT.