Sure, he talks a big game about "fiscal responsibility," but it's more a rhetorical tick than any sort of commitment to adequately funding national priorities. This week is emblematic of the president's bankrupt talking point.

On Wednesday, the president sent his Secretary of Defense to ask Congress for 192.8 billion to fight a war that most Americans don't want to fight. Meanwhile, the president is threatening to veto Congress's proposed spending levels because they are "irresponsible and excessive level[s] of spending." Furthermore, Bush is also threatening to veto the reauthorization of SCHIP because the bill would provide insurance for too many children.

• 68% of Americans think the U.S. should decrease or remove all troops from Iraq.
• 63% of Americans support the $35 billion expansion of SCHIP to provide health insurance for an additional 4.4 million children.

Naturally, the president has threatened to massively increase spending on the former and veto the latter.

The president supports neither fiscal responsibility nor national priorities. If the president was serious about fiscal responsibility, he would fund his war. If he supported national priorities, he would sign the wildly popular and fiscally responsible (paid for by a cigarette tax increase) SCHIP expansion.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and Service Employees International Union will be marching and rallying in Washington, DC on Monday to protest the president's expected veto of expanded SCHIP funding.

The Center for American Progress has done a nice job illustrating data that the National Priorities Project just released on who's bearing the cost of the war. You can check out your state and see how much of the nearly $193 billion supplemental you'll be paying.

But the thing is, for the most part, nobody's paying anything to finance this war just yet. We're just racking up more debt, and that'll have to be paid off from now until eternity.

When the bill comes due, most likely it'll go like this: no politician worth their salt will support a massive progressive tax increase to pay off all the debt generated by the war. So instead, the annual interest paid on the debt will grow, putting more pressure on discretionary programs that typically help working and middle class people. This means either programs will grow slower or be cut. A tax increase could pay for part of it. But unless it's a big and hyper-progressive tax increase, which it probably wouldn't be, President Bush and the Republican Congress will have succeeded in making the middle and lower classes pay for this war.

Another way to look it is how we've been paying for the war: i.e. to a great extent, by borrowing from the Social Security trust fund. By law, the government will have to replace the money it's borrowed. But it's quite plausible that social security solvency will be achieved by payroll tax hikes and benefit reductions, at least in part. When that time comes, let's not forget what we're really paying for.

When Congress proposes to buy kids health care and actually pay for it, or prevent cuts to vital social programs, the President opposes it. Deficit-financed war is a-o-k, though.

Centrist David Broder thinks its crazy to oppose SCHIP.

The spectacle Tuesday of 151 House Republicans voting in lock step with the White House against expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was one of the more remarkable sights of the year. Rarely do you see so many politicians putting their careers in jeopardy.

The bill they opposed, at the urging of President Bush, commands healthy majorities in both the House and Senate but is headed for a veto because Bush objects to expanding this form of safety net for the children of the working poor. He has staked out that ground on his own, ignoring or rejecting the pleas of conservative senators such as Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch, who helped shape the compromise that the House approved and that the Senate endorsed.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, informed Congress that the White House would be requesting $193 billion to run the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in FY 2008.

The AP reports that on top of the $150.7 billion requested in previous months, Gates asked the approps committee for an additional $42.3 billion, which includes:

• $11 billion to field another 7,000 MRAP vehicles in addition to the 8,000 already planned;
• $9 billion to reconstitute equipment and technology;
• $6 billion for training and equipment of troops;
• $1 billion to improve U.S. facilities in the region and consolidate bases in Iraq; and
• $1 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces.

CBO has released its score for the recently passed House bill that would increase funding for SCHIP.

• SCHIP provisions alone are $27.7 billion above CBO baseline of $27.4 billion
• Other provisions in the bill, including additional Medicaid outlays are $7.2 billion above CBO baseline
• Total spending above CBO baseline is $34.9 billion
• These additional mandatory expenditures will be offset primarily by a 61-cent per-pack cigarette tax totalling $35.5 billion
• The increased funding will allow 4.4 million additional children to enroll in SCHIP and 1.3 million additional children to enroll in Medicaid

CBO's Estimate of the Effects on Direct Spending and Revenues of the House Amendments to the Senate Amendments to H.R. 976, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007

The SCHIP expansion bill passed the House last night by the large margin of 265 to 159. 45 Republicans voted for it, while only 8 Democrats voted against it. Kudos to everyone who called in!

Now the fight moves to the Senate. Unfortunately, the House vote fell short of the 2/3 majority needed to overturn a veto. The Senate now has to get a veto-proof vote, which should put pressure on more House members to overturn a veto. If they don't get there, the new funding levels will have to come down, and fewer children will be enrolled in the program.

And let's not forget that those who oppose the expansion are largely the same folks who want to spend $200 billion for a sixth year of war. When they vote against SCHIP or the appropriations spending, they're saying that they'd rather have the money go to more endless war. What kind of values are those?

The House is scheduled to vote on the SCHIP bill in hours, while the Senate will vote on either Thursday or Friday.

If you haven't already, please make sure to call your representatives. The toll free number is 1-866-544-7573. It sounds cheesy, but millions of kids are counting on you to do it.

Posted by Matt Lewis, 05:52:45 PM



Renewing Fiscal Responsibility

The Brookings Institution will be hosting an event to get the presidential candidates focused on the deficit. But only six years post-Clinton, they may be tilting at windmills.

A quick look at the web sites for the top three Democratic candidates for president reveals not a thing about their views on governmental borrowing. None of them list "fiscal responsibility" or any of its variation as a high priority issue. Most telling was Sen. Barak Obama's (D-IL) recent speech laying out his tax policy platform, in which not a cent would be devoted to deficit reduction (and the Brookings Institution hosted the speech!). Meanwhile, Republican candidates are fixated more on fiscal "discipline" than responsibility- another way of proposing to cut spending a little and give out monster tax breaks.

All the Democratic candidates support PAYGO. But I see no evidence that any candidate has paid a price for their inattention to deficit reduction. Deficits, per se, just don't seem to matter much to the public. This is somewhat unfortunate, because the $3 trillion run up in the debt is a big deal, and the public needs to know more about it.

Here's what I propose: Fiscal responsibility-ists could get the public's attention by talking about the spending projects that account for the debt increase. Unlike deficit reduction, they happen to be high profile issues. For example:

• The war in Iraq is unpopular, important and entirely deficit-financed. We all will be paying for it through payments on the debt. Most likely, the debt payments will be paid for through more taxes, spending cuts or spending foregone. Combined, they will be relatively more regressive than if taxes had been increased on the wealthy. This may get people who are concerned about the war interested in the debt.
• I imagine the public does not know that the tax cuts will have to be paid for because they were deficit-financed. The Brookings/Urban Tax Policy Center (and...yes the Hamilton Project) has documented that the tax cuts will reduce incomes for over three-fourths of the public. You know why you didn't know that? Because borrowing conceals who really pays the bills. We all pay for the tax cuts, through payments on the debt. Those who object to the regressivity or ineffectiveness of the tax cuts may then get interested in the debt.

Bottom line: the debt is important mostly because it shows that the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress's many costly policies were not a free lunch. The public ought to be educated about the impact of these policies, and who was responsible for them. Fiscal responsibility-ists are the people to teach them.

But the time when the public believed debt is important mostly because of its inherent harmfulness is over.

Update: See this Watcher article for more

From the AFL-CIO blog:

Let's also use these numbers for the appropriations conflict. That'd make 82 more days in Iraq as costly as the difference between the President's budget requests and the Congressional proposal. The President's cuts would take away:

• nearly 370,000 veterans' health care
• 9,223 teaching jobs
• 12,000 cops

See this breakdown by state for more of the impact of the President's cuts. And check the headlines for the impact of the President's decision to keep funding this war.

President Bush wants (at least) $200 billion for another year of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he won't pay for health care for kids or veterans, or more cancer research, all things that would be funded under proposals Congress is considering but the President has threatened to veto. Dean Baker on the President's perverse priorities:

Another way to assess the importance of spending on the war is to compare it with other budget items that have been in the news. The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) provides an obvious example. President Bush is threatening Congress with a veto if it appropriates more money than he has requested.

The difference between the bill likely to be approved by Congress and the amount requested by President Bush is $30 billion over five years or $6 billion per year ($20 per person per year). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this money would be enough to insure another 4 million children.

Let's compare the amount in dispute on the SCHIP bill with spending on the Iraq War. The $120 billion a year in spending on the war comes to about $10 billion a month, or $0.3 billion a day. This means every 20 days we spend enough money in Iraq to make up the full difference between the SCHIP bill likely to be approved by Congress and the amount of money requested by President Bush. Since CBO estimates this additional funding would ensure four million kids, we can conclude that every day we spend enough money on the war in Iraq to insure 200,000 kids for a year.

The SCHIP vote in the House is tomorrow. Tell your representative to vote for it and to override Bush's looming veto. You can call toll free, 1-866-544-7573.

Enough of all this insanity, already.

The reliably informative Robert Pear has a good article on the budget debate in today's New York Times. I didn't know this:

Mr. Bush's public comments suggest he is determined to veto one or more appropriations bills, to highlight what he describes as excessive spending. But neither side has a postveto strategy.

Democratic leaders in Congress say they have yet to resolve the most basic strategic question: Should they negotiate with the president or just send him bills reflecting their priorities and wait to see what happens?

They haven't figured out a strategy? There are six days left in the fiscal year. That's not terribly encouraging.

FedSpending.org has launched a new version today, with updated data from parts of FY 2006 and FY 2007, new features and search functionality, greater accessibility for people with disabilities, and a few bug fixes in the site. The site now contains contracting data through the second quarter of FY 2007 and federal assistance data through the first three quarters of FY 2006.