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Friday, February 10, 2006
The Real Problem With The 2007 Budget
Much has been made of the secret computer run published in the Washington Post yesterday that shows detailed and substantial program cuts over the next five years and the contrast between proposed increases for defense and military spending and cuts to pretty much every other domestic investment (read here, here, here, and here).
The computer run shows detailed White House projections over the next five years for spending in a variety of budget categories. This is usually information that is readily available in the budget, but has frequently been suppressed by this administration. the information shows drastic cuts to a variety of programs on the domestic discretionary side outside of defense.
This detailed information is important to have and should have been released with the budget. Yet the scope of the proposed cuts could be seen in the budget release on Monday - it just requires a bit of digging. We reported Monday in our analysis of the budget that by assuming some very conservative and probable increases to the defense and homeland security budgets over the next five years, all other discretionary programs would have to be cut by 16 percent by 2011 under the President's proposed budget caps. (It turns out the actual number is 13 percent, but you get the idea).
At first glance, this appears to be a guns vs. butter budget - proposing sacrificing domestic programs to pay for increases in military budgets because we cannot have both. Yet we can. As Bernard Wasow of the Century Foundation whimsically points out, the real problem with this budget is that it assumes "we must shoehorn size 7 spending needs into a size 5 revenue slipper." The real problem with this budget is that does not address the substantial and continuing gap between federal revenues and federal spending.
If too much focus is given to the specific proposed program cuts in the out-years of this budget and not to the fundamental structural imbalance in the federal government, those cuts are just the first of many, many to come.
Posted by Adam Hughes
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