IN THE NEWS

Editorial

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

INNUMERACY

February 8, 2005

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH has proposed a budget that shows a poor grasp of basic arithmetic. He plans to cut the deficit while spending hundreds of billions more each year on the war in Iraq, cutting taxes by $2.1 trillion dollars over a decade and spending another trillion or two transforming Social Security.

In grade school, this kind of math would get an "F" grade. In Congress, the president gets an "A-plus" from his fellow Republicans for vision and boldness. Mr. Bush made the amount of red ink in the 2006 budget appear to be just under $400 billion by leaving out the $80 billion-plus that the wars and rebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost. Nor does it include any of the costs of his remake of Social Security, estimated by Vice President Dick Cheney at $750 billion over the next decade. Why do fiscal conservatives in both parties let him get away with this?

In addition, Mr. Bush's budget would cut 150 federal programs, many of which Congress won't touch. The ax would fall heavily on the needy, with cuts in heating aid, housing, literacy programs and health services for veterans and the poor. Environmental programs, especially clean water projects, also would suffer sharp cuts.

Mr. Bush's proposal to reduce subsidies to farmers by $5.7 billion over a decade deserves serious consideration. It saves money and complies with rules of international trade. But the proposal might not get out of the barn because the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, already opposes it.

The administration made a series of sensible proposals for the Missouri and Mississippi rivers -- providing money to rebuild side channels on the Missouri and suspending farm levee projects on the Missouri. The administration also did not endorse new locks on the Mississippi. The latter project, a top priority of farmers and the barge industry, likely will be backed in Congress by Sen. Christopher S. "Kit" Bond, R-Mo.

The proposed $419 billion Pentagon budget also seems sensible. It expands the Army and Marines and adds counterterrorism commandos, while cutting back on the expensive F/A-22 jet, reducing Navy shipbuilding and even slowing spending on the missile defense system.

There are other dubious bookkeeping tricks in the Bush budget. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, points out that the administration would treat the proposed extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts as having already been enacted. That would mean that estimates of the cost of making the tax cuts permanent would be zero, instead of the real cost, $2.1 trillion over 10 years.

Mr. Bush's stated goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 also comes with caveats. One is that Mr. Bush is promising to cut the deficit from the $521 billion projection he made a year ago, rather than the actual deficit of $412 billion. In addition, Mr. Bush is promising to cut the deficit in half, not in real dollars but as a share of the economy. That's a fine measure, but it is also a lot easier. Because the economy is growing, the president can cut the deficit's share of the economy without cutting spending.

The gimmicks of February will be gone by the time Congress passes spending bills in the fall. But the consequences of waging a war while cutting taxes will be the same: numbers that just don't add up.