Budget woes keep growing

Budget woes keep growing

President Lyndon B. Johnson oversaw the first $100 billion budget and Jimmy Carter the first $500 billion budget. In 1987, Ronald Reagan’s budget was the first to crack the $1 trillion mark.

Now, one president, George W. Bush has taken the budget over the $2 trillion mark, in 2003, and the $3 trillion mark this year.

We will acknowledge that simple dollar figures can be deceptive, since they aren’t adjusted for inflation. But clearly, for one president to see a 50 percent jump in the budget over five years — and during a period when inflation was historically low — is alarming.

And it is especially troubling because this president and his Republican Party bill themselves as fiscal conservatives and between them controlled the legislative and administrative branches of government for most of the last seven years.

Few presidents have managed to balance their budgets over the last 75 years, although Franklin Delano Roosevelt probably earns a bye, given the Great Depression and World War II. Harry S. Truman inherited the presidency in the last days of World War II, was president during the Korean War, and still managed to balance his budget five of his seven years. With luck, a few presidents since have had one or two balanced budgets — most had none.

Two records in sight

Not only has President Bush’s new budget broken through the $3 trillion ceiling, it is probably going to result in a budget deficit that will flirt with the $412 billion record that he set in 2004.

To bring those figures home, the $3 trillion budget represents expenditures of about $9,800 for every man, woman and child. A $400 billion deficit means an additional $1,300 in debt for each of us, and, given the national deb t is already more than $9 trillion, we each already carry a $30,000 share of that debt.

To be fair, President Bush finds himself between a rock and a hard place in 2008, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and economic stimulus package that is working its way through Congress adding to the projected deficit.

But it is not as if true fiscal conservatives have not been warning for years that something was going to have to give. And it is not an accident that the President did not veto a single bill — spending or otherwise — as long as his party controlled Congress.

The president can attempt to use executive orders and vetoes to rein in runaway spending, but that isn’t going to work. He can take a hands-off policy and leave it to his successor to clean up the mess. But that would be irresponsible.

So here’s a radical idea: Why don’t the president and Congress start working together to trim the budget? Everything will be on the table. Social programs. War costs. Pharmaceutical contracts. Farm subsidies. Taxes. No sacred cows.

It would be a painful process for Republicans and Democrats. But the alternative of doing virtually nothing will be more painful for the nation.