How To Talk About the Deficit
A lesson in the art of avoidance from the Bush economic conference.
ByTimothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Dec. 16, 2004, at 2:24 PM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111173/

President Bush is holding an economic conference this week at the White
House. The whole thing is about as spontaneous as a wrestling match; even
David Brooks called it a "pseudo-event." So I'm not particularly surprised
that, at today's session on the budget deficit, nobody suggested that taxes
be raised. Republicans always oppose raising taxes. It did surprise me,
however, that even a staged conversation about the deficit could take place
without anyone proposing a specific budget cut.

Conservatives in general, and the Bush administration in particular, favor
budget cuts. At the conference, President Bush said there were going to be
"some tough choices on the spending side," and he boasted that "non-defense,
non-homeland discretionary spending" had increased at a rate of less than 1
percent over last year. But "non-defense, non-homeland discretionary
spending" is a tiny sliver of all the money that the government spends.
Overall, the federal government this year spent an estimated 5 percent more
than it spent last year, and that's only counting expenditures through
November. Bush doesn't like to cut spending; he likes to say he likes to cut
spending. In truth, Bush spends just as freely as a Democratic president
would, if not more. The only significant difference is that Bush is bleeding
domestic programs in order to increase spending on the military and homeland
defense. Bush's hypocrisy about government spending is so naked that a whole
new ideology, "big government conservatism," had to be invented in order to
explain it away.