[Mb-civic] Bush's Domestic Neglect - David S. Broder - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Bush's Domestic Neglect

By David S. Broder
Sunday, February 12, 2006; B07

The federal budget, for all its bewildering detail, sketches a 
remarkably clear picture of the priorities of any administration. 
Congress always puts its own stamp on the fiscal design, but when you 
have a situation where the same party controls both elected branches, as 
Republicans do now,

the modifications tend to be at the margins.

What the budget released last week shows about the Bush-Republican 
regime is essentially a very simple story. Financing military operations 
has taken an increasing share of the federal dollar, with health care 
and Social Security eating up much of what remains.

The squeeze has been felt by a variety of other domestic programs, but 
especially -- and significantly -- by those where Washington is supposed 
to be a partner of state and local governments.

There's been a lot of attention given -- and properly so -- to the way 
Uncle Sam has commandeered National Guard troops from the states for 
service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But an examination of budget trends 
shows that Washington has been just as effective in siphoning money from 
the states and cities to help finance our military obligations.

National defense outlays rose from $304.8 billion in 2001 to $535.9 
billion in the current fiscal year -- an increase of 76 percent. In the 
same five-year span, health care and Medicare, combined, rose from 
$389.6 billion to $611 billion, up 57 percent. Social Security and other 
federal retirement and income-support spending went from $702 .8 billion 
to $915.3 billion, an increase of 30 percent. Everything else the 
government does -- at home and abroad -- went from $466 billion in 2001 
to $645.6 billion in 2006 -- an increase of 39 percent.

During those five years, the public debt rose from $3.3 trillion to $5 
trillion -- a measure of the degree to which we have failed to pay for 
the government activities that Congress and the president have approved. 
Even with interest rates declining, the net interest bill has risen from 
$206.2 billion annually to $220 billion.

What this has meant is that federal aid to states and cities has been 
shortchanged. While federal payments to individuals -- through such 
programs as Medicaid, welfare and food stamps, in which states share the 
costs -- grew rapidly in this period, those for infrastructure, housing, 
education and other domestic purposes grew more slowly, even with the 
addition of large sums for homeland defense.

The trend is particularly striking when it comes to capital expenditures 
-- the financing of highways, airports, mass transit, sewage treatment 
plants and community development. Measured in constant dollars, they 
grew only 10 percent in five years -- and the federal contribution 
actually declined when compared with the sums that state and local 
governments were investing.

This year, once again, the Bush administration has targeted urban 
programs for cutbacks. Last year the president tried to kill the 
Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program in its historical home 
in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and substitute for it 
an alternative that would be run out of the Commerce Department.

Responding to protests from mayors of both parties, who said that the 
grants were their most flexible tool for spurring investment in blighted 
downtowns and neighborhoods, Congress rejected the Bush plan. But this 
year the president wants to cut CDBG funding by $1 billion, a reduction 
of more than 25 percent.

A joint statement from 14 groups described the cut as "devastating" and 
a "serious threat" to ongoing projects. The statement noted the irony 
that the administration has used the program as the best vehicle to 
deliver $11.5 billion of emergency funding to Gulf Coast communities 
devastated by last year's hurricanes, but it nonetheless wants to take 
the program out of many other cities.

Rep. Michael Turner, the Ohio Republican who heads the House task force 
on urban affairs, conducted hearings last year on the program and has 
recommended improvements in it. But he said he is concerned about the 
impact of President Bush's proposed cuts on a program he called 
"essential to our nation's communities and neighborhoods."

"Reducing funding to these programs hurts people trying to recapture 
their neighborhoods and revitalize their communities," Turner said.

This is but one of many examples of the way that important domestic 
programs are being jeopardized by the priorities of this government -- 
and especially by Bush's adamant refusal to raise the revenue needed to 
support the ever-more-expensive war effort.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/11/AR2006021101021.html
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