Sunday, March 19, 2006; Page B06
WHAT WOULD IT take to get the federal budget in balance -- honest, no-gimmick, no-fooling balance -- without raising taxes? This is a question the Bush administration would prefer not to discuss, and for good reason: It would require cuts so deep and wide as to be unimaginable as a matter of politics and unwise as a matter of policy.
How can we be sure? Well, the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative House members, has produced an alternative budget that treads where Bush will not. And it is a helpful document, not in the sense of being realistic but for exposing the airiness of administration claims of fiscal prudence. Balance could be achieved by 2011, it shows, but only if Americans are willing to sacrifice a good chunk of their health care, education, energy, transportation and foreign aid -- in fact, pretty much all of the federal budget outside defense and veterans.
What would go? Extra unemployment benefits and training to workers who lose their jobs as a result of foreign competition, heating assistance for low-income families, family planning funds, subsidized loans for graduate students and, after 2009, funding for the federal highway program. Also, Amtrak, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Agency for International Development and President Bush's Millennium Challenge Account. Substantially reduced would be funding for low-income schools, United Nations peacekeeping forces, the National Institutes of Health and block grants to states to pay for preventive health care for mothers and children. Head Start would be frozen at 2005 levels.
Average enrollment growth in Medicaid, which provides health care to poor people, was more than 7 percent annually between 2000 and 2004, and medical inflation itself is about 5 percent. Yet this budget would limit the growth in federal spending on Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which provides health care to uninsured children just above the poverty line, to 4 percent per year. The result? More poor people, and more poor children in particular, would go without care.
Some of the proposed cuts, such as eliminating farm subsidies or killing NASA's moon/Mars exploration program, are sensible. But they also are highly unlikely; just think how much trouble Congress had recently agreeing to a mere $40 billion in entitlement cuts.Altogether, the alternative budget would cut almost $700 billion over five years -- $332 billion in non-defense discretionary spending and $358 billion in entitlements -- while allowing for $299 billion in new spending on defense and veterans and $630 billion in tax cuts (extending the previous Bush tax cuts plus adjusting the alternative minimum tax). And, for discretionary spending, these cuts are from 2006 levels -- they don't even take into account how inflation over the next five years (projected to be a cumulative 11.4 percent) would further strain federal dollars.
Outside of defense, the amount spent on discretionary programs would be nearly a third less in 2011 than current spending, adjusted for inflation; it would amount to the smallest share of the economy (2.2 percent in 2011) at any time since 1962, when that number was first measured. And even that understates the magnitude of cuts required; the budget doesn't make room for war funding after the next fiscal year.
These budget cuts would be shortsighted and mean-spirited; they would transform the role of the federal government. We find much of this unthinkable, and we believe most Americans would, too. That's why Mr. Bush doesn't talk about the real-life consequences of his tax cuts, and the real-life people who will suffer from them after he leaves office. So we thank the Republican Study Committee for producing this document. If this is what you want government to look like, go ahead and support the extension of the president's tax cuts and oppose any tax increases.
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