Gussying up the garbage

[La_Serpiente]

Gussying up the garbage

There is nothing shy about the bush administration when it comes to putting the best possible face on its plans. But even seasoned budget watchers who thought that when it came to cosmetic enhancement they'd seen it all were awestruck by the aesthetic extravagance, the unparalleled daring of the fiscal 2005 budget that the president unveiled last week. "Irresponsible," "unbalanced," "deceptive" were among the tamer epithets tossed about by critics on both right and left. Forget the Super Bowl striptease; for unabashed exhibitionism, this budget is hard to beat.

Where to begin? In its pumping up of this year's deficit--the better to accommodate election year handouts while making it easier to meet Bush's promise to halve the deficit in five years? In its omission of any costs for military operations in Afghanistan (news - web sites) or Iraq (news - web sites)? Its choice of five-year, rather than the usual 10-year, forecasts, so that the cost of fully phasing in and making permanent the president's tax cuts and prescription drug program wouldn't be revealed? Its pretense that relief from the creeping alternative minimum tax need only be extended for one year?

Still, for unmitigated gall--not to mention miserable policymaking--it's hard to beat the half-a-Paygo rule the president would impose as a curb on the runaway budget deficit. Paygo, you may recall, was the budget constraint Congress imposed on itself in the 1990s whereby any increase in spending or cut in taxes had to be offset by a corresponding spending cut or tax hike. Of course, Congress found ways to skirt the restriction, but by and large it had a salutary effect; witness the now vanished surpluses that the current administration inherited. Bush, however, would apply the rule only to direct spending, with no limits on tax breaks. The result would be both predictable and pernicious: The spending wouldn't go away; it would just go under cover, hiding out within the already labyrinthine corridors of the tax code.

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Gussying up the garbage