I’m not good at math. I’m a terrible guesser. I can barely balance my checkbook, and am not sure why I should. As far as I can tell, I’m practically a certified economist.
As an almost certified economist, I don’t like Bush’s proposed $2.4 trillion budget. Specifically, I’m not thrilled when I read on CNN.com that the federal deficit in the current year is going to hit $521 billion.
I want there to be a job for me when I graduate where I don’t have to offer people paper and plastic. I want to put money toward my kids’ college when I’m forty, not federal loans. I want there to be money for my health care when I’m seventy.
There is a flip side.
I don’t mind some of the budget increases.
I’m not livid over the 7 percent increase in military spending above and beyond the $87.5 billion dollar wartime spending. I know a lot of kids who joined the military because they had nowhere else to go, and army training was the only way out.
I don’t mind the money for the Mars mission. Hey, the space program gave us Velcro and Tang, and that was just to get to the moon.
I can’t argue with the increase for job training programs, like the one that links community colleges with employers, or the $18 million increase for the National Endowment for the Arts.
This increase in spending could even theoretically boost the economy. At the start of the Depression, Herbert Hoover would cut the budget every time the economy dipped. This decreased confidence in the economy, so people would buy less, so the economy would dip again. Nasty cycle. Roosevelt came in and spent more than anyone ever knew could be spent, like on the WPA. Combine that with WWII, and no more Depression. Score.
So on one hand I like at least some of the budget increases, and on the other hand, I know anything we spend now we not only are going to have to pay off later, but pay off three-fold.
What tips me into dislike, though, is that Bush wants to make his tax cuts permanent: tax cuts that are mostly for the rich. Tax cuts that are supposed to cost an additional $1.2 trillion over the original $1.7 trillion dollars.
Bush has an ideology. Give the people their money, and the economy will boom.
The only problem being that Regan tried that, and it didn’t work. The deficit boomed, not the economy. Clinton instituted a pay-as-you-go policy of never paying for anything for which we didn’t have the tax revenue, and we had a budget surplus. It disappeared into the tax cuts of George W. Bush, while he simultaneously increased spending. Never mind that the evidence says his ideas aren’t working – Bush has an ideology.
While increasing spending could theoretically boost the economy, cutting taxes while spending more can’t. So I don’t like Bush’s $2.4 trillion dollar budget. Not because I’m a liberal hippie who can’t stand the military.Not because I’m a conservative who hates how big government spending has gotten under Bush. But because those tax cuts, and that budget, has nothing to do with what works, or what little comprehension of finance a practically certified economist can muster, but with Bush’s ideology.