Budget won't be balanced unless everyone does his part

President Bush comes off a weekend marked by his conciliatory trip to a retreat of House Democrats in Virginia where he even promised to do better about remembering there is an "ic" on the end of Democratic Party, something that is sure to stick in the craws of right-wing talk show hosts who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything democratic about Democrats.
But it is going to take more than gestures to get the Republican White House and the Democratic Congress on the same page of the budget President Bush will submit today.
Bush told the congressmen, "Some of it you'll like, some of it you won't like, but it achieves the goal that we have said, which is to balance the budget."
Well, maybe.
The president's annual budget approaches 3 trillion, and will do its part toward achieving a balanced budget five years down the road -- three years after Bush retires to Texas -- only if an assumed growth in the economy continues and only if some painful spending cuts can be push through Congress and only if the increasing bite that the alternative minimum tax is putting on the middle class isn't addressed.
Oh, and only if about 235 billion in Iraq War costs over the next year and a half are kept off budget.
That's a lot of onlies. And that's only the quick, short list.
It's ironic
The irony, of course, is that the present federal fiscal year is one-third over and the Democratic-run Congress is still tinkering with nine of the 13 funding bills that should have been passed no later than October 2006 by the Republican Congress.
The president, in effect, is asking Democrats to do what he couldn't or wouldn't ask Republicans to do when they were in charge of the House and Senate: show fiscal discipline.
This budget mess was not an accident. The Republicans didn't have the intestinal fortitude or political will to address the budget before the November elections, and after the elections they decided to dump the mess into the lap of the incoming Democrats. Not only would the Democrats have to make the hard choices that Republicans wouldn't, but it would cut into the time the Democrats could devote to their own priorities.
House Democrats instead took the continuing resolution that was passed at year's end by the Republicans and was to expire Feb. 15, tweaked it and sent it to the Senate for approval as the final 463.5 billion federal funding measure for the rest of the fiscal year.
Most programs were frozen, some -- veterans' health care, the National Institutes of Health, Head Start and Pell grants, prison construction, the FBI, the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy research, international AIDS relief and some housing programs -- got increases, and about 60 programs were actually cut.
Not the way to go
The entire enterprise was a lesson in how not to run government.
The only chance for any real progress in balancing the budget -- and, dare we say it, reducing the 9 trillion federal deficit -- is for the White House and both parties in Congress to work together. To do that, they'll have to put aside a lot more than the "ic" factor.