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Today's Commentary: 09.13.04
Bush by the Numbers
For over four years, I have taken umbrage with the economic policies of our President. I have had to explain the nuances of his actions and words as they relate to your wallet, the often unpredictable reaction given by Wall Street, and of course, the thank you notes that flood the Oval office from corporate America as time and time again, he sided with business. To err is human it was once said, but what he has done to this country economically is unforgivable.
One of the biggest economic blunders of this decade will be the haunting and lingering effects of the war in Iraq. He will continue to defend his reasoning for going there, championing himself as the savior of the Iraqi people while imploring the American public to be supportive of our troops. We are but that support has turned into empathy, the sort of emotion you have when a good friend is trapped in a dead-end job with an awful boss.
The economic impact of the war is not so easily absorbed into the average American's thinking. The cost of lives, now headed towards its second thousand young men and woman is tragic. The Bush administration is quick to deny the correlation to Vietnam. There, they are quick to point out, 58,000 soldiers lost their lives because of a failure of Washington to calculate the costs of fighting an unwinnable war. A thousand lives is far less they would like to say, if they all kept cadence with their denials. But that would be politically suicidal and they know that. But those lives came with a price tag.
What about the war on terror? The Bush administration has repeatedly played on the angst created by 9-11 suggesting, and then denying, that with another President in the White House, another attack is bound to happen. The belief that the world stage which is currently populated by more than a handful of American dissenters and due to the lack of homeland spending, has made terror a real possibility as long as their is an Iraq to occupy and occupy our time and resources is well founded. But that situation was created solely by the President.
By the beginning of August, the cost of the war could be tabulated at $144.4 billion dollars. The Republicans were quick to point to the fact that America is safer largely because we are fighting in a foreign land has begun to ring hollow. That money could have gone a long way to keeping our shores much more safe, our experience with fear at a minimum and the job of terrorists much more difficult.
In an op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times by Michael Pan, Amy Terkel, Robert Boorstein, P.J.Crowley and Nigel Holmes, the dollar amount of the effort in Iraq was broken down. The President has found it easier to stand at the podium and say that he has done everything a commander could do to secure the home front against future attacks. It would have been true if he had spent the money more wisely. Our ports, including upgrades to the Coast Guard and better cargo security would have costs less than fourteen billion dollars. Nothing was done to protect airlines from the potential surface to air missile launchers that seem to be everywhere on the black market. Another $10B would have gone a long way to take these weapons off the lists of terror weapons of choice. The police and fire departments would have benefited from $13B in upgrades including hiring over 100,000 new officers, an upgrade to the communications systems, as well as securing major roads and railways. Throw in another thirty billion or so for nuclear security, increase divisional forces by 40,000 while doubling the current ranks of special forces would come with an agreeable price tag of $40 billion spread over the next five years or so. The rest the $144.4 billion would be goodwill pocket change that would go a long way swaying the rest of the world's opinion of the wealthiest nation.
We should also consider, the piece pointed out, that the estimated cost to contain Saddam was less than $3 billion a year when he began his campaign to oust the Iraqi leader.
On the homefront, the President did little to help the economic condition of the country even as he attacks his opponent. Last week, the President took Kerry's record on taxes to task declaring that higher taxes are a Kerry inevitability. Taxes on cars and gasoline, the working people and doubly so, if those same people are married were all mentioned by Mr. Bush as negatives that await America should the office be handed over to his opponent. Citing a Senate record spanning twenty years is much harder than he has made it sound, but he successfully made the future of this country seem awfully dismal when it comes to counting pennies no matter what income level you are - or who is elected.
Mr. Kerry is faced with the unenviable challenge of fixing a budget that has become outsized and unwieldy.. The federal debt will continue to soar even as the President claims he will halve it ten years. That debt by the way, is now estimated at $4.7 trillion and climbing. It will predictably spiral out of control after that as the bulk of the baby boomers, the ones who are too old for the President's ownership society, begin to retire and look for the services promised them.
Far too much of the Bush plan relies on continued economic growth. His plan is hitched to the wagons of the wealthiest 2% of the nation's taxpayers. When they pay less they will generate more jobs through opportunity, reinvestment and reinvigoration of corporate America. This has mostly proven false. Those jobs have yet to materialize and because of that, GDP forecasts published by the White House and the Congressional Budget Office will seem overly optimistic as they fall short of the mark.
The CBO did point out in its report that if the costs of the war were removed from the budget for the next five years, the Bush tax cuts would quickly fill the void. The combination of the two has become anti-stimulative and the planned 4% GDP will fall below estimates as well.
Referring back to the rosy projections given the President in 2000 by that same office for this year, its no wonder he chose to give the money back in the form of tax cuts. No Republican could sit on a surplus of the size that was projected by the office. Instead, through tax cuts, the war, and any spending the President did on security quickly erased the projected $397 billion surplus leaving instead, a $819 billion deficit.
So Mr. Kerry should be telling the American people that tough times are ahead. He will be forced to fix many of these budgetary mistakes through aggressive belt tightening at a time when Americans are facing lack of insurance in record numbers, job security that is almost nonexistent, and a shifting world stage of economic proportion, the likes of which the American people have never experienced. This is inevitable.
Or the American people can leave Bush in office and watch the legacy of the most powerful nation on earth crumble under its own economic arrogance. That will be the final costs that will be hard for the history books to deny.
The Blue Money Report
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