White House is starting to lose its credibility
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Exactly when is it appropriate to be skeptical of the news coming out of the White House? Question the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and you're accused of sympathy for the devil. Question the administration's secret energy policy meetings and you're guilty of an attack on the Constitution's separation of powers. Question judicial nominees and you suddenly become an ideological obstructionist.
But Americans are right to ask questions of President George W. Bush, and they're right to expect honest answers.
The latest cause for concern is the White House's admission that the budget deficit for 2003 will hit $455 billion this year and $475 billion in 2004. Josh Bolten of the Office of Management and Budget tried to sugarcoat the news by saying that, as a percentage of the overall economy, these deficits aren't the largest in U.S. history.
"This is well below the post-World War II peak of 6 percent and indeed it's lower than in six of the last 20 years," Bolten said.
Of course, in terms of absolute size, the budget hole is the largest ever.
But that's just quibbling. Americans don't care about the deficit's title — biggest in history or seventh-biggest in history. What they care about is its impact on their wallets, on fiscal policy and on society.
The fact is that budget deficits are loans that we borrow from our children, and that will be a burden on them for years to come. Deficits also make it much harder to shore up Social Security or strengthen Medicare today. Deficits almost always hurt social programs that provide aid and sustenance to the most vulnerable of our citizens — the elderly, low-income families and children.
What ought to enrage most Americans, though, is that the budget forecast fits the same pattern of misdirection that accompanied the buildup to the war in Iraq.
We now know that the White House was less than scrupulous about the case it made for the war in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said he knew exactly where weapons labs would be found outside of Baghdad and Tikrit, but our weapons inspectors couldn't find them. The president himself cited intelligence about an alleged Iraqi attempt to get uranium for a nuclear weapon, intelligence that he and his advisors should have known to be inaccurate and based on forgery.
We went to war, and when the justifications for that war didn't pan out, the administration trotted out other reasons and tried to finesse the earlier ones.
In the case of the deficit, we now see the same thing. In February, prior to the second Bush tax cut, the White House projected a $305 billion deficit. Again, that's bad enough, but supporters argued that the tax cut wouldn't make the deficit worse because a stimulated economy would produce more revenues.
So Congress passed a tax cut. And the deficit grew by more than 50 percent. Now the White House is saying that the budget picture won't improve until 2006.
Enough is enough. It's one thing to make a case for tax cuts. It's another thing to simply make it up.