This entry was going to be called “Money Talks” and focus on two impressive paragraphs from a Robert McIntyre economic analysis in The American Prospect:
“Bush’s assertion that he’ll cut the deficit in half by 2009 includes the following explicit assumptions: Spending on defense and homeland security will fall by 14 percent as a share of the economy by 2009. Total domestic appropriations will plummet by 24 percent, with huge cuts in science (minus 19 percent), pollution control (minus 27 percent), transportation (minus 18 percent), disaster relief (minus 49 percent), education (minus 22 percent), housing assistance (minus 33 percent), and law enforcement (minus 20 percent). The alternative minimum tax will be fixed, but at no cost — rather than the $65 billion that even a modest correction would cost in 2009 alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Even with all these ridiculous assumptions, Bush’s projected regular budget deficit for 2009 remains at $501 billion. He offsets that against the $263 billion he projects as Social Security’s surplus that year. Voila! A ‘unified deficit’ of a mere $237 billion.”
I was going to point out that some of Bush’s critics had it wrong, because they didn’t believe him (a mistake we’ve made before), that far from “ridiculous” what these spending projections show is that Bush doesn’t believe in a “secure” United States - at least as some experts would define (and spend for) it - something some critics can’t seem to fathom. Proof is easy to come by, having just scrapped an expensive Navy destroyer development program, to take one example, should we be investing huge amounts in another one that may never produce a single ship (it’s speculative), when we still aren’t inspecting all cargo containers that are shipped to our shores? Ditto with every other issue (he believes in private security (for the wealthy) not Social Security for all, his position on science is ‘faith-based’ and ‘politically-based’ and really anything but ’scientific,’ etc.). Thus, these funding projections are actually a (relatively) honest showing of his real intent and policies.
But what struck me as I thought about it is that I would in many ways just be echoing others like Katrina vanden Heuvel and Robert Kuttner, or the authors of some of the leading critical books on Bush.
There’s nothing wrong with being an echo - in fact it can be quite powerful politically. But what’s more interesting is discussing what in business is called the product mix. Above I’ve shown some of what the anti-Bush forces have, some magazines (small, specialized audience) some books (ditto on the audience — it doesn’t take a lot of sales to be a top selling book relative to the voting population). There are new think tanks including one created by former Clinton cabinet officials. There are new political action groups trying to mobilize voters such as ACT and those from former Dean team members, with Howard Dean announcing on March 18 his own. There is a new liberal radio station coming at the end of this month. There are a number of groups, known by the section of the IRS tax code that they fall under (”527’s”) that will spend tens of millions on ads critical of Bush. They include established players like Moveon.org from the Clinton years and newcomers like the Media Fund. This is a small sample of what’s going on - the question is about distribution. Will the “product mix” work for the anti-Bush forces? Can they reach the voters? More thoughts on this later.
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