Bush the Budget-Buster By Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, January 30, 2003; 8:32 AM Imagine - hard as it is - President Gore standing in the House chamber and delivering his annual address to the nation. He calls for spending $400 billion over the next decade to strengthen Medicare and launch a prescription drug program. He calls for $450 million to bring mentors to disadvantaged students and children of prisoners. He calls for $600 million for treatment programs for drug addicts. He calls for $15 billion over five years to combat AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. He calls for $1.2 billion to develop clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles. What do you suppose the Republicans would be saying about Al Gore? Big spender? Wild-eyed liberal? Doesn't understand that government is the problem, not the solution? Wouldn't there be lots of accusations of fiscal irresponsibility - especially when the $417 billion in new spending is coupled with $674 billion in tax cuts? But no one in the GOP that we've seen is suggesting that George Bush's brand of compassionate conservatism is, well, kind of expensive. And the Democrats, who have their own domestic laundry list, obviously don't want to go there. Much of this, of course, was overshadowed by the intense focus on the Iraq portion of the State of the Union. But if Bush wants to spend all this money on new programs - admirable as that might be - how is he going to restrain overall spending, as Mitch Daniels keeps promising? Exactly which programs is the White House going to cut (or, excuse us, restrain the growth of spending)? How is the administration going to keep the nasty ol' deficit - which has now shot up to $199 billion, according to the CBO yesterday - from exploding? No Democratic president would get a pass on this sort of fuzzy math, not with the budget plunging back into the red after years of surplus. But it's not the script to question the spending habits of a supply-side Republican president, since the GOP no longer cares very much about this sort of bookkeeping or thinks we can Laffer-curve our way into the black. Now we can all get back to worrying about the butcher of Baghdad. ABC's Note hits the bullseye: "Bill Clinton said seven years ago that the era of big government is over, but somehow, under the ministrations of this conservative-minded and big-hearted Republican President, it seems to be back. "Say you are an abject supply-sider, and you don't believe that the additional tax cuts would add one red cent to the deficit. "How then, still, to explain $400 billion for Medicare, $1.2 billion for (cue Don Pardo) 'a new car!,' $6 billion for Project Bioshield, $450 million for new mentors, $600 million for drug treatment, and $10 billion for AIDS? "Despite all those SAO pledges that the speech would not be a laundry list, the president's domestic section was a laundry list - and one of domestic 'priorities' that would make Al Gore or Bill Clinton proud. "Oh, how George W. Bush used to mock Gore for trying to encourage new auto technologies. "And don't forget that those Social Security changes the president briefly re-touted last night still come with a trillion-dollar transition cost price tag." Salon's Joe Conason recalls another presidential candidate who pushed the idea of replacing the internal-combustion engine: "That's Al 'Ozone Man' Gore, in the revised foreword to the 2000 reissue of his 1992 book, 'Earth in the Balance.' Back then the Republican Party apparatchiks and all the conservative pundits ridiculed Gore's kooky ideas about replacing the internal combustion engine. "The moronic Jim Nicholson, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, used to stand at the fax machine all day, sending out messages that attacked Gore for wanting to do away with the internal 'combustible' engine, which were duly repeated by all the right-wing hacks. They used Gore's farsighted ideas against him in places like Michigan and Tennessee, where lots of cars are built. Now they will all tell you that Bush is simply brilliant for supporting this visionary technology." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A172-2003Jan30.html
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