Friday, April 01, 2005
Bush, a straight shooter? Please
Editorial commentary
Recent contributions
- Can we be a two-trolley town?
- Striving for civility
- School funding no fantasy
- Pesticide board's work will continue through merger
- Commentary archive
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
±
Flaccavento, of Abingdon, is a winner of the Ford Foundation's 2004 Leadership for a Changing World award. He writes and speaks about farming and community development.
"Thank you for restoring honor and dignity to the White House, Mr. President." These words, uttered by a woman at a rally after President Bush's State of the Union address, echo a sentiment felt by millions of Americans: That our president is someone we can trust, a plain talking "straight shooter." The problem is that George Bush is not a straight shooter.
For starters, let's look at Social Security. While the president talks about fixing a system that is "going broke," he is in fact taking huge amounts of money away from Social Security's surplus to help reduce the federal deficit. This year alone, he proposes to take about $150 billion from the trust fund.
By 2042, the year when most agree the system will begin to operate at a deficit, that $150 billion would have grown to $447 billion in available funds. But under the president's plan, it's a big fat zero. And that figure grows dramatically when you consider that the Bush administration has already taken more than $500 billion out of the trust fund since 2001.
So, when the president says the system is rapidly running dry, remember that his policies are draining the well, making the problem far worse.
George Bush is not a straight shooter.
Next, there's the budget deficit, currently projected at $424 billion for fiscal year 2006. Without the money taken from Social Security, it would be $589 billion. And if the cost of the war in Iraq were included, it would exceed $700 billion. That's right, $700 billion.
The president and Donald Rumsfeld say that "it's impossible to project" the costs of the war, so they must be kept out of the budget as an emergency supplemental item. This is nonsense. Budgets are always projections, based on past experience and future expectations. After two years in Iraq, we can make a reasonably accurate estimate of what annual costs would be, and in fact the Pentagon has such estimates. But including them in the budget would make his deficit projection far higher.
George Bush is not a straight shooter.
What about the recently adopted prescription drug benefit the president pushed so hard to get? When the debate was under way in Congress, it was described by Bush as a $400 billion add-on to Medicare. Now, his administration has said the true cost will be closer to $750 billion over 10 years. How can the estimated cost have grown by nearly 90 percent in a matter of months? What could they know now that they didn't know last summer?
George Bush is not a straight shooter.
And then there's the war in Iraq, relentlessly sold to the American people based upon WMDs and implied connections between Saddam and al-Qaida. When both were refuted, the administration changed the rationale for going to war, never admitting to mistakes in fact or judgment.
Bill Clinton lied to the American people about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. It took getting caught before he owned up to both the deed and his dishonesty about it. But he did come clean. George Bush, on the other hand, has never admitted to a mistake in his four-plus years as president, never owned up to the numerous egregious deceptions of his administration, deceptions that are costing our nation billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Yet many people credit him with restoring "honor and dignity" to the White House. Count me among the incredulous, because if one thing is clear by now, it is this: George Bush is not a straight shooter.
