President Bush asked Congress yesterday to spend another $81.9 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to the $2.57 trillion budget unveiled last week. Bush's incessant preaching of fiscal responsibility, illustrated by cutting a number of smaller programs, is negated by his continuous spending on his pet projects like Social Security and Medicare reform. The cut programs could prove to be Bush's downfall, and the Republican Party's by extension.
It's interesting to see that many of the big-ticket items receiving media attention, such as the Social Security privatization plan, aid to tsunami victims, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not included in the federal budget. The initial number waved around last week is misleading to both Congress and the general public.
What's worrying is the number of programs that will have funding cut or eliminated to make room for Bush's grand plans. Yesterday's Washington Post reported that agricultural programs would be cut by 17 percent and Veterans' programs by 16 percent, while funding for rural airports would be cut in half. These programs are vital in many red states, where Bush finds much of his support.
In order to save money, guidelines will be rewritten to make it more difficult to qualify for food stamps, which will cut about 300,000 individuals from the food stamp program, according to last Sunday's New York Times. Another 300,000 low income families would be disqualified from child-care assistance.
For students, the Perkins loan program will be eliminated, and diverted to the Pell Grant program, which is harder to qualify for than Perkins loans. Forty-eight educational programs will be eliminated, including college-prep programs which focus on recruiting students who are the first in their family to go to college. Lower- and middle-class college students will bear the brunt of Bush's grand schemes, along with rural red-staters, veterans and low-income families.
These domestic programs, among others, are to be cut so that $2.2 trillion can be spent in the next ten years to reform Social Security, $1.1 trillion to fund tax cuts, $724 billion to support Medicare drug benefits, and at least $2.57 trillion to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, although the final figure will probably be much higher.
It is necessary to increase spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially since the newly allocated funds are going where they are needed most. Nearly $12 billion will be spent on refurbishing military trucks and $7.4 billion on training local armies in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times. The government must ensure that U.S. soldiers are properly armed and work to create stable infrastructures in both Iraq and Afghanistan so our troops can leave sometime in the foreseeable future. The remaining $62.5 billion must be spent in the same prudent manner. The fear for many, however, is that the Bush administration will divert funding towards new ventures in Iran and stretch U.S. forces even further beyond capacity.
The Bush administration should have put all of its costs into the federal budget, not split it up to make the overall price tag seem smaller. Big-scale projects that do not have enough support to be viable are receiving too much investment and even Bush's red-state backbone will be hard-hit in the coming years. The Republican Party could be paying for the ramifications of its budget in the next election.
