Fiscal-Conservatives Come Lately

[kentuck]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/opinion/27thu2.html

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This year's $92 billion "must pass" measure, while supposedly restricted to the pressing costs of the war and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast repairs, has been turned into a fiscal Christmas tree. Billions have been added for extra farm subsidies, highway repairs, higher education, veterans' health care and forest maintenance, and even a $15 million bauble for something that's called a "seafood promotion strategy."

Taxpayers interested in fiscal sanity should first wonder why, three years into the war, its costs are still being rushed through Congress by administration planners who are obviously wary of detailed accountability. No less irresponsible is the growing penchant of members of Congress to bypass the harsher tests of the regular budget process in favor of giving their pet projects a ride aboard the White House's annual "emergency" express. The $4 billion the Senate ponied up for extra farm subsidies certainly deserves a more serious look, considering that farm incomes have been booming, in part because of a record $23 billion in crop subsidies.

What's at the heart of the veto threat is an intramural Republican war over a feared mutiny by voters this November. House Republicans running as fiscal "hawks" (after years of cheerleading for the costly Bush tax cuts for the affluent) back the president's budget request; the Senate Republicans who are more concerned about popular spending programs opt for the add-ons. No one mentions the responsibility to find revenues to someday pay for all this, plus debt costs.

With his eye on a run for the White House, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, one of the enablers of the administration's ongoing budget mess, scolded his colleagues to take care "not to blow the bank on the back of war." But the bank's already been blown.