E.J. Dionne gets a bit impolitic in his Washington Post column today when he rails about how “fundamentally stupid our budget policies have been over the past five years.”
Dionne notes that the cost this year alone of the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 comes to $225 billion, more than enough to pay the costs of the Katrina recovery. Unfortunatley, the Republicans will wreck our economy, allow our infrastructure to deteriorate and sink us under a mountain of debt before giving up one penny of their tax cuts for the rich.
This devotion to tax cuts above all else is not “conservative” as Dionne rightfully notes, it is “radical.”
...our current budget policies are built not on honest coherence but on incoherence or, even worse, a dishonest coherence. The president and members of Congress always insist that they are fiscal conservatives who believe in balanced budgets. Yet their actions bear no relationship to their words, and labels such as "conservative" have no connection to their policies. Our federal purse strings are in the hands of fiscal radicals.
Dionnes says he would have more respect for these guys if they would at least be honest about their radicalism:
... if they just came out and said: "Look, we love deficit spending. That's why we waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and cut taxes at the same time. It's why we'll talk about offsets for Katrina and Rita but never enact them, except maybe a few cuts in programs for the poor. All we really care about are passing tax cuts -- and popular spending programs that get us reelected so we can enact more tax cuts."
I just hope our nation is strong enough to withstand three more years of this radical mismanagement of our government and economy.
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