Budgeting for Conservative Credibility

President Bush's newly proposed budget is, of course, insane—not the blueprint of a budget for a civilized nation at all.

It would cut home heating assistance for poor families by 22 percent, and Amtrak rail service by over a third (remember, back about ten years ago, when the train route you take ran about twice as often?). One key job-training program—Employment Service/One-Stop Career Centers—would collapse by a factory of nearly 12: from $820 million in FY 2007 to $69 million for fiscal year 2009. Anti-poverty Community Service Block Grants? Gone, gone, gone. State and local economic development? In 2006, HUD's Community Development Fund created over 55,000 jobs. Bush wants to cut it by almost a billion dollars.

Medicare and Medicaid? Down $200 billion over five years. Teaching hospitals? We don't need no stinking teaching hospitals. He's cutting their funding too, as part of a $2 billion dollar hack into the Health and Human Services Department's budget. Veterans would pay higher co-pays under Bushbudget '09, which would also eliminate 47 education programs.

Then it starts getting nutty.

It would end the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants Program, which helps college students with exceptional financial need. It would end Perkins Loans, the best student loan program extant. It would end assistance for local police forces who want to train their cops in community policing. It would cut Homeland Security grants to state an local governments by a billion dollars.

(The Senate Majority Leader's office has a handsome rundown of these facts here.)

Madness. But got to close that budget deficit, right?

Not quite. Actually, Bush's budget produces record deficits. According to the Wall Street Journal, under Bush's glide-path to ruin, "The federal budget deficit will soar to near-record levels in fiscal 2008 and 2009, the Bush administration said Monday in its $3.1 trillion budget request, a surge in red ink attributable to cooling corporate tax receipts and the cost of a short-term economic stimulus package. The White House expects the deficit to reach $410 billion in the current fiscal year, just short of the record set four years ago. In fiscal 2009, which begins in October, the budget gap is seen at $407 billion.”

And it calls for $12 trillion more debt by 2013.

That's because, in part, as Isaiah J. Poole documented the other day, Dubya proposes the most military spending since Dubya Dubya II. What's more, that doesn't even count Iraq and Afghanistan: notes the Times, “War-fighting supplement spending measures are outside the base Pentagon budget, an issue that has angered some in Congress. Pentagon officials have proposed a $70 billion special war budget just to carry on operations from Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year, into the early months of the next presidency. Another supplemental spending proposal is expected before October, but after Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Iraq, reports to Congress on his recommendations for troop levels through the end of 2008.”

What the hell's going on here? Is this any way for a president with his eye on his legacy in the history books to behave?

It is, if you're a conservative.

With righties braying on talk radio every day how Bush has "betrayed" the Reagan legacy—by, say, supposedly proposing amnesty for undocumented immigrants; never mind that Reagan actually implemented amnesty for undocumented immigrants—our president, marinated in the movement that has taken over the Republican Party, can only be assured of some last-gasp respect in their eyes by going out pledging fealty to the undying conservative project: proving government cannot possibly be humane and effective.

Of course, nothing George Bush tries even works, so he's still sure to go down in the rights' annals as a terrible conservative. The question is, how much civilization can he bring down around our ears in his desperate last-ditch attempt?

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future