Past Time for President to Brush Up on His Math

By: Marianne Means

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George Bush told a television interviewer: "I'm not quick in my mind in math." If we had only realized how slow his arithmetic skills really are, we might have avoided the dangerous economic morass into which he has led the federal government.

There were other warning signs, too. He couldn't adequately make his own tax policies add up. He kept talking about cutting federal spending but offered no specifics. He promised that he could simultaneously cut taxes, balance the budget, pay down the national debt, increase spending on defense, save Social Security, and boost spending on education.

When his rival Vice President Al Gore pointed out that this meant accomplishing 16 impossible things before breakfast, Bush accused Gore of using "fuzzy math". Amazingly, Bush got away with it. His blithe assumption that he could do this was even bolder, and rasher, than Ronald Reagan's fiscal approach, which Bush's father, who became Reagan's Vice President, once called "voodoo economics".

Reagan campaigned for the White House in 1980 contending he could balance the federal budget, vastly expand defense spending, and slash income taxes without cutting crucial government services. He would do this by eliminating "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the federal bureaucracy. It was, of course, a political fantasy.

When this didn't work in actual practice, concessions were needed and deficits mounted, Reagan quietly allowed Congress to increase income and Social Security payroll taxes to narrow the burgeoning red ink.

During campaigns, voters don't pay much attention to economic details. They want to hear things that sound good, no matter how contradictory. It's the rhetoric that matters.

California gubernatorial candidate and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is a more practiced politician than people think. He refuses to provide any specifics about his fiscal plans for a state that is mired in deep budgetary problems because he thinks the "numbers" are unimportant. We'll soon see if history repeats itself in California.

Bush didn't worry about making fiscal sense either. And he still doesn't, apparently. He continues to insist that his massive tax cuts be made permanent, although Congress phased them out in order to win their passage. And GOP House Majority Leader, Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, absolutely rules out any tax increases. That is, he says, "dead as disco".

Bush has, however, said he would not campaign for further tax cuts next year even though his advisers once boasted they would push for ever-bigger tax cuts every single year he is in office. This means the next big planned cut, total elimination of the estate tax, which now only affects the very, very rich, may be postponed until a second term, if not abandoned altogether.

Alarm bells about growing federal deficits began ringing soon after Bush passed his first huge tax cuts. They are now clanging away with frightening hurricane force.

A new report by the Congressional Budget Office predicts a record $480 billion deficit next year, growing to nearly $1.4 trillion in new debt over the coming decade. This does not even include our unbudgeted share of the long-range costs of the continuing war in Iraq, which U.S. occupation coordinator L. Paul Bremer estimates at "several tens of billions" of dollars.

Other expert estimates of the budgetary shortfall have ranged up to $600 billion and more. How much more depends on the still-unknown cost of rebuilding Iraq and the degree to which we can persuade other countries to help out. Plus how sympathetic the administration will be to state governments, suffering from their own budget crises, which are demanding financial help to meet the costs of federally mandated programs.

When Bush came to office the government had a $5.6 trillion, 10-year budget surplus. It took him only two years to turn that into the present deficit.

Yet Bush claims "we will grow our way out of our deficit", a miracle that is based on no historic precedent whatsoever. He also says that too much federal spending is the problem, not too few tax revenues, although his tax cuts have reduced that revenue by $3.12 trillion in two years. He himself has vastly increased spending, primarily for defense, counterterrrorism, and education. And what discretionary domestic programs would he cut?

No more road building or maintaining of national parks? Throw his faith-based community service initiative to the winds? Force parents to pay for public education? Stop funding the courts, law enforcement, and the National Institutes of Health? Housing aid? Air traffic controllers?

It's awfully late but it would be in the national interest for Bush to learn addition and subtraction. Maybe Laura can help.