Kevin Collins: The party's over for the Bush budget

Hangovers have faded, fraternity dumpsters are brimming with bottles and cheap plastic masks, and beads hide in the backs of closets as reminders of somewhat blurry memories of drink and debauchery. In other words, Mardi Gras is over.

Originally, Fat Tuesday was when one used up all the lard and sugar in the pantry -- prohibited foodstuffs during the Lenten season of fasting. Modern American culture, however, has traded in a fat holiday for a culturally obese one that is not one day a year but rather 365.

Decadence certainly has its time and place -- Spring Fling and Fat Tuesday are two prime examples. But Fling without finals and Mardi Gras without Lent are yin without yang, and in many ways, our society increasingly lacks this necessary balance.

Certainly not least among these ways is how our Frat Boy in Chief is running the government. Perhaps it's not quite fair to say that President Bush is spending money like a drunken sailor -- a drunken National Guard pilot who may have gone AWOL, sure, but that's not the point. The problem is not so much spending as it is tax cuts.

Bush has been recklessly slashing taxes to benefit the wealthiest Americans. However, given what his tax cut binge has done to our budget, it's time to start fasting.

Bush's past budgeting has left us with a $521 billion gap between what the government is earning and what it is spending this year. Keep in mind that two years ago, he predicted that this year's deficit would run only $14 billion, and that glimpse into his crystal ball came after Sept. 11 and the ensuing recession, on which Bush is blaming this year's record shortfall.

But that was then, this is now, right? Bush claims that his budget will cut the deficit to $364 billion for 2005. However, taking into account the administration's stellar track record at deficit forecasting, and the fact that they are counting on a very optimistic 13.2 percent increase in revenue entirely from economic growth, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical. Moreover, Bush's deficit spending is sending the economy in the opposite direction. The Brookings Institution predicts that by 2014, the economic slowdown resulting from these budget deficits will cost the average family $1,800 in income.

But what's in this budget is not nearly as disturbing as what is left out. True, the hefty 7.1 percent increase in defense spending may at first seem reasonable for a nation with armies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those expenses aren't actually in this budget. Expected to cost up to $50 billion, the Bush administration is waiting to ask Congress to cut that check. Bush furthermore leaves out of his budgetary forecast the impacts of making his tax cuts permanent, which will, according to The New York Times, cost more than $900 billion over 10 years.

Bush even omits explanations of how he will pay for the programs he does bother to include in his proposal. For example, the budget calls for tax credits to help the uninsured purchase health care. However, immediately after listing the $65 billion the program will cost, he marks a negative $65 billion, erasing it from the budget's total and saying only, "When the Congress moves legislation to implement the president's health care proposal, the administration will work with Congress to offset this additional spending."

That's way beyond "fuzzy math" -- it's not even a budget, merely items on a wish list added without making the hard choices about what must be cut to afford them.

Even the $521 billion deficit wouldn't be so bad if we didn't already face a national debt of nearly $7 trillion, about $24,000 for every American. And according to the comptroller general, that doesn't even count Social Security and Medicare commitments, which when added more than quadruple the $24,000 figure.

Guess which generation is going to be paying off that 100 grand?

Once upon a time, Republicans were the political party of few services and lower taxes, while the Democrats wanted to spend money on programs and were willing to enact the taxes to pay for them. Bush wants it both ways, and responsible leaders in any party should recognize the fiscal farce he is perpetrating on the American people.

In the new morning light, streets that teemed with Mardi Gras carousers the night before look dirty, desolate and bleak. Voters are waking up to a similar morning in America. We have a record budget deficit and job losses to match -- and while we can't say for certain how they got them, come budgetary daybreak, Don Rumsfeld and the wealthy are stumbling home with a whole lot of beads around their necks. Yet it's not Bush who will be feeling the economic hangover from his binge -- it's the 8.3 million Americans who cannot find work, and it's our generation, the unwitting inheritors of America's failing promissory note.

Bush must set aside his politics of excess and put our finances back in order, and if he doesn't, we need to find a president who will. Otherwise, it's not our parents that will be bailing us out and paying off the bill; they're passing that buck on to us.

Kevin Collins is a sophomore political science major from Milwaukee, Wis. ...And Justice For All appears on Mondays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.