Under cover of war
The New York Times
FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2005
An American taxpayer might ask what the pending "emergency" budget bill
dedicated to paying for the Iraq war has to do with oil drilling in
Mississippi, flood repairs in Utah and a stadium for Washington's new baseball
team. The answer is that the expensive war effort provides fast and reliable,
if shameful, cover for these goodies and more. Approval of the spending bill
for Iraq and Afghanistan seemed so certain in the Senate that unscrupulous
members of Congress larded it with favored boondoggle projects that would be
thrown out if put to a vote on their own merits.
The Bush administration is locked in the shock-and-awe stage of budgeting
as it demands an additional $80 billion from a compliant Congress without
including these huge expenses in the normal budget process. The underlying
fiction is that the battlefield obligations are still too urgent to be detailed
and defended in the annual budget. The real aim is to hurry the debate and keep
the war bill out of the deficit tally during the budget process.
That has opened the door for Congress to impose an equally insincere
rationale: If the war is still rated a budget emergency by the White House,
then there's room for what one Republican leader termed "emergency requirements
here at home." Thus has a budgeting tool for true, distinct emergencies been
reduced to a cheesy nonaccountability gimmick that helps the U.S. deficit
balloon with political impunity in Washington.
The total war and reconstruction investment in Afghanistan and Iraq is
approaching $250 billion and counting - if anyone were seriously counting. But
lawmakers have been too busy inserting politically motivated appropriations
into the carte blanche measure to look at the bottom line.
Aid for the Asian tsunami victims has also been tacked onto the bill -
spending that has nothing to do with Iraq but at least is arguably urgent.
What's totally indefensible is the inclusion in the House-approved measure of
hard-line restrictions on immigrants' ability to gain asylum and get driver's
licenses. This and a rival Senate proposal to make it easier, not harder, to
hire low-wage immigrant labor are the stuff of what should be a separate, grave
debate. It's time for Congress to stop throwing these rocks into the pot of
emergency Iraq expenses.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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