Rebuilding after Katrina with dollars and sense

Where will President Bush and Congress find another $200 billion?
That is the biggest question that will have to be answered in the wake of the president's announcement that rebuilding the Gulf Coast is going to "cost whatever it costs." That is an admirable sentiment, given the shattered lives and structures left by Hurricane Katrina.
But it is one thing to write a blank check; it is another to make good on the check.
In the days following the president's announcement, he made one clarification. He's not interested in increasing taxes to pay for digging out the coast. And House Majority Leader Tom DeLay made another clarification. He said there's no pork to be cut from the budget, because the budget has already been cut to the bone.
If that's truly where the White House and the House of Representatives are, there's only one way they are headed -- toward adding most of the cost to the already staggering federal debt. Just as they did with the war in Iraq and as they are willing to do with the immense costs of the prescription drug bill, the administration and the House leadership appear willing to pass on the costs of Katrina to our children and grandchildren.
It will fall to the Senate to do what it narrowly failed to do in recent budget negotiations: restore sanity to the process.
Transportation bill
U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, has already proposed lopping 25 percent off the $286 billion, five-year transportation bill (starting, we hope, with the infamous $250 million bridge to nowhere in Alaska). His colleague from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, has suggested reopening the energy bill, which included $12 billion in subsidies for oil and gas producers.
Meanwhile, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich is calling for an unrelated move toward fiscal sanity and honesty, the "Truth in Budgeting Act of 2005," which would bar Congress from using the Social Security Trust Fund to balance the budget. Given the pressure the administration and Congress are going to be under to rework the budget to accommodate the costs of Katrina, Voinovich has probably not picked the best time to get his measure passed, but it is absolutely the best time to remind everyone that Congress has found it far too easy to borrow and spend.
President Bush and the Republican Congress have presided over record increases in federal spending and each year has seen a record federal deficit -- $412 billion last year.
The Heritage Foundation -- a friend of the administration -- estimates an $873 billion deficit within 10 years.
The borrowing as if there is no tomorrow has to stop.
The cost of rebuilding after Katrina is going to have to be paid for by some combination of trimming or postponing the president's upper-income tax cuts, requiring new spending programs and tax cuts to be offset elsewhere in the budget and, as already mentioned, cuts in the highway bill, the prescription-drug benefit and energy subsidies.
And, of course, everything should be done to rein in the costs of Katrina relief, without breaking faith with its victims. Past hurricanes have produced horror stories of misspent funds, especially in Florida.
A bill to establish a chief financial officer for Hurricane Katrina Relief has already been introduced in the Senate, and Voinovich has announced that he will be a co-sponsor. The CFO would be responsible for the "efficient and effective use of federal funds in all activities relating to the recovery from Hurricane Katrina."
It makes sense for Congress, which is going to have to find the money to pay the bills, to demand that money isn't being wasted.