In reality, the cost of tax cuts will prove much more threatening over the next five years than the cost of post-disaster spending. The tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 cost the federal government more each year than the total amount the U.S. government is likely to spend dealing with the one-time expense of hurricane relief. The 2001/2003 tax cuts are slated to cost $225 billion this year alone and even more with each coming year as the tax cuts take increasing effect. As illustrated below, the five-year cost of the tax cuts is more than seven times the anticipated costs of all expenses related to the hurricane.

Congress should be more concerned with the persistently large and growing national debt, and the structural deficits that have caused it, than with the one-time expense of Gulf Coast recovery and reconstruction. Large deficits over a number of years, such as those we have seen over the past few years, can erode the quality of future living standards by reducing national saving - which slows the accumulation of wealth - and degrade overall economic performance. Temporary deficits, on the other hand, can serve the important purpose of supporting economic activity, employment, growth, and other policy objectives in the near term, without significantly harming long-term deficit projections.

In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that if $200 billion is borrowed to pay for hurricane costs, the projected deficit ten years from now will only be about 3 percent higher than it would be had the hurricanes never happened.

As a Congressional Budget Office report on the subject succinctly states, "Policies that increase the deficit but also provide incentives for people to work, acquire more skills and education, undertake research and development, invest, innovate, or use resources more efficiently may do less harm to future living standards than policies that increase the deficit without providing such incentives." Further tax cuts concentrated toward the wealthy add to the deficit, while providing few of the above-mentioned incentives. Emergency reconstruction spending, on the other hand, if implemented correctly, could have the potential of spurring growth and creating vast and immediate opportunities for people whose livelihoods have been devastated.

This one-time spending could prove to be an important step towards shifting our federal government's focus toward making long-term investments in neighborhoods and communities. Comparatively, such a shift will have much less of an effect on future deficits than President Bush's other budget and tax policies (defense spending, for example) and will do far more good for average Americans.