Politics and Press

The Budget: Bush’s Strategy for America

The budget that President Bush presented to the Congress yesterday is a near culmination of his shell game. It goes something like this. He produces a tax break for the rich, spends billions on a fiasco war in Iraq, develops a huge deficit, then comes up with a budget which he says will reduce the deficit he created – but not by reducing defense budgets, which will continue to increase at a time when the country’s defense expenditures are greater than the total for all other countries together.

Rather, for Bush it has become time to reduce support of programs aimed at ordinary people – programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, education and environmental agencies, heating assistance for low-income families, etc. At the same time he wants to make his tax cuts for the wealthy, permanent.

It has been clear from the beginning of this odious presidency that he was intent on changing the nature of the American experience by returning the country’s operating ethos to that of pre-Roosevelt days. It would, in a sense, be a matching domestic legacy to that of his foreign policy, which has given us the Iraq disaster, distaste and anger from the citizens of former allies, the loss of the country’s moral edge, the end of bipartisan commitment to America among its people and the end of American prestige and honor.