May 23, 2:55 p.m.: A budget of bad priorities

Bush budget would hamper ability to provide social programs in the future.

By: Hank Kalet
   I suspect President George W. Bush will make the biggest of deals when he takes out his finest pen to sign his ill-conceived and dangerous tax cuts into law.
   After all, the tax cuts and his hideous spending plan are the defining actions of his domestic policy, one designed put cash in his best buds pockets and leave the rest of us wondering just what happened to all those little programs on which the rest of us have come to depend over the years.
   In a fine essay in Harper’s this month (not available on line), Thomas Frank dissects the federal budget, outlining the deceit and gimmickry used to make it seem friendly to the bulk of taxpayers.
   "The 2004 budget is toxic," he writes. "It is an epic of distortion and evasion and contradiction and misleading rhetorical ploys. The object of this malodorous epic is to outlien the Bush Administration’s plan for plunging the nation from surplus into deficit and to cast the blame for the ensuing disaster o the very people — the retired, the sick, the poor — who will feel the brunkt of its effets."
   Basically, this budget asks the wealthy to pay a lot less, the rest of us to pay a little less (about $300 for the year, or $6 a week) and sets it up so that future spending is constrained by a lack of revenue. And that’s the key. This is a budget designed to strip the federal government of its ability to provide positive social programs and to force Congress to gut Social Security and Medicare — not now, maybe not next year, but in the near future.
   (The Washington Post offers a solid editorial today that takes on the tax cut.)