Budget FY 2006

Expensive nonsense from expensive liars

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

2/7/05

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/fy2006.htm

You have to give Putsch credit for sheer, bald-faced audacity. On one hand, he wants to cut funding for Medicaid, farmers' payments, student loans and veterans’ medical services $137 billion over the next decade to reduce the huge deficits. But at the same time he wants to make permanent tax cuts that would increase the deficits by about $250 billion over the same time.

Putsch reportedly said, "It's a budget that focuses on results. The taxpayers of America don't want us spending our money into something that's not achieving results." Money for disabled vets and Amtrak doesn’t produce any worthwhile results, but giving money to people who don’t need it does. Republinomics, don’t you know. Give all of America’s money to the super rich, and they will take good care of us.

Some of the cuts defy belief. In the middle of two wars, he wants to double the co-pay Vets have to fork out for medications. He did increase overall spending for the Department of Veterans Affairs by 2.7%, but he’s created a lot more injured vets than we had two years ago. And medical costs keep going through the roof, since Republicans have created a system in which medical and drug providers are free to charge the government as much as they want for their goods and services, and the government isn’t allowed to challenge that, or to shop around.

Just more of that Republican looking-out-for-the-taxpayer stuff, I guess.

He proposes to eliminate all funding for Amtrak. It’s not achieving results, since neither he nor any of his rich friends ever need to ride it, so why waste the money they’ve taken from the country on it. Just working people use the train, and if that’s taken away, well, that will give them incentive to go out and buy cars, right?

In a move that would be considered curious in a rational administration, Putsch proposes to shaft the farmers, eliminating some $580 million in price supports. Farmers are among the reddest of the red-state crowd. While some of that is meant to close loopholes that were allowing big cotton and rice corporations to evade the limits set by fair value, he also proposes to make across the board cuts of 5%, a move that won’t hurt Tyson or ADM much, but will put thousands of small farmers out of business. Which, given that Putsch envisions an America where everybody works for large corporations, is probably the whole idea. ADM and Tyson will probably be able to buy up the land cheap, which should take some of the sting out of losing a couple of percent off their net profits.

Spending for such items as food stamps would grow sharply (10%) since for some odd reason, there are 2.7 million more recipients then there were a year ago. Must be all those people who came off the unemployment rolls. WIC and school lunch spending would also jump by about 5% each, reflecting the actuality of the worsening economic picture among the nation’s poor and powerless.

Remember all that noise about being America’s "education president"? That was then; this is now. Putsch wants to eliminate 50 programs and cut over 100 others. But he does have more money for those worthless "No-child-left-behind" tests.

Putsch didn’t propose cuts or remedies for Medicare, the $340 billion program that, unlike Social Security, really does have a funding crisis. The problem, of course, is that Putsch previously had rammed through legislation that gives health care providers and pharmaceuticals the right to charge the government whatever the hell they want to charge, and the government has no options; they can’t shop around for lower prices (particularly in Canada) and they can’t even complain about what they are being charged.

Imagine trying to run a business where the government rules that you can only use one provider, and then doesn’t give you the funds to handle any abuses that provider might engage in. It’s called "Free market," only it isn’t a market, and it sure as hell isn’t free in either sense of the word. And people can’t figure out why they have a medical system that is simultaneously one of the worst in the developed world and the most expensive.

On Energy, Putsch actually had two things that made sense; a billion dollars for nuclear non-proliferation, including guarding Russian nuke sites and encouraging countries not to develop nukes. And he increased the funding for developing hydrogen-fueled vehicles by 25%. But he also cut drastically into the nuclear plant cleanup superfunds, and he wants money for a "bunker-buster" nuke (the description sounds something like "an around-town 767").

Given how hard they fought for it, it’s perplexing that the admin cut their budget for the Yucca mountain nuclear waste dump, but they did, by nearly a quarter billion dollars. Maybe they decided to let Halliburton handle the safe disposal, and decided that actually burying the stuff was optional. Putsch also wants $56 million to promote building a new nuclear power plant, an item bound to amuse Greenpeace. (If it costs over $50 million just to consider the idea, what would the project itself cost?)

The budget doesn’t include the costs affiliated with Putsch’s privatization scheme. Two trillion in the first five years for a scheme that will enrich multinational banks and ruin the lives of tens of millions of hard working Americans. Putsch must be feeling relieved that he doesn’t have to put the startup costs of that little adventure in a budget until it passes – by which time, the damage would be done, of course.

The budget, as it stands, would be a high American tragedy. But there is one element that makes it low farce, instead.

It doesn’t include the costs of the wars. Rummy explained that you just can’t figure something like that, although previous administrations seemed to be willing to try.

Putsch already has $25 billion allocated for 2006 for Afghanistan, and is expected to request $81 billion for Iraq. That is the basement figure, and it’s based on the lyrically optimistic notions that things won’t get worse in Iraq, or that we’ll manage not to get into other wars in that region.

But it shows the utter dishonesty and contempt for the American people that this administration has. The reason for all the nasty cuts in programs made for lower and middle class people, the ones that will ruins thousands and perhaps millions of lives, is because Putsch, cornered, made a wild promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009. By leaving the war out, along with SS privatization, and by cheating hardworking people across the country, he can claim to have reduced the deficit some $50 billion from the previous year’s all-time high, and thus "be on track" to cut the deficit in half by ‘09. The theory is that after this budget gets blown to shit by reality and a Congress not willing to declare war on the American people, hopefully everyone will have forgotten that little "cut the deficit in half" line.

But the budget, and its savage attacks on regular people while coddling the rich, make the saying perfectly true, the saying about there being two types of Republicans.