To say that President Bush’s new budget director, Jim Nussle, has his work cut out for him would be an understatement on the order of “Lindsay Lohan needs to grow up.”
Nussle, who earned a reputation as a partisan Republican infighter during eight terms representing Iowa in the House, now has to face a Congress controlled by Democrats. Worse, the new budget boss has to convince the nation that the Bush administration is serious about reining in a federal debt that has ballooned from $5.8 trillion to the current $9 trillion on its watch.
In recent weeks, Bush has gone on the offensive on the budget front, threatening to veto spending bills that exceed his proposed $933 billion “cap” on the approximately one-third of the federal budget ladled out by the House and Senate appropriations committees each year.
Democratic budget plans exceed those ceilings by about $23 billion. While the difference amounts to only about 2 percent of that third of the federal budget that isn’t on automatic pilot in the form of entitlement programs, Bush told a recent news conference that $23 billion was “a lot of money.”
Indeed it is. In fact, $23 billion is so much money that it’s nearly 10 percent of the last year’s federal deficit of $248 billion and a bit more than a tenth of the $205 billion deficit predicted for the current fiscal year. Putting it another way, $23 billion is enough to pay for about two months of the war in Iraq — the real cause of America’s fiscal hemorrhage.
Until and unless Bush winds down the war, there’s no hope of a balanced budget without rolling back some of the tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2001 and 2003 — with the avid support of Nussle, who then chaired the House Budget Committee. Not only is a $23 billion spending cut far too little to restore solvency to the federal treasury, Bush is highly unlikely to deliver on some of his veto threats.
For example, the Senate on Thursday passed a bill providing $64.7 billion in discretionary budget funding for veterans’ programs and military base construction. Bush has not threatened to veto that bill — funding politically untouchable medical programs for veterans — even though it’s $4 billion higher than his request.
On the positive side, the new Democratic leadership has reinstated the so-called “pay-go” rule that says new spending programs or tax cuts must be paid for by offsetting spending cuts or tax increases. That at least eliminates the illusion that either tax cuts or new spending have no impact on the deficit.
House Democrats also say they’ve kept the pledge they made after taking control of the House in January, when they agreed with Bush that special spending “earmarks” should be cut in half from the 13,492 totaling $18.9 billion approved by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2005. But earmark reform may be a tougher fight in the Senate, where legendary pork-barreler Robert Byrd,
D-W.Va., still chairs the Appropriations Committee.
During his six-year stint as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Nussle once called the notion that Democrats could be fiscally responsible “laughable.” But unless he can persaude his boss, President Bush, to practice what he preaches on the budget front, the joke may end up being on Nussle — and the long-suffering American taxpayer.
