February 8, 2006

If I Cut My Budget Shaving, Do I Not Bleed?

President Bush is proposing to shave. Folks in Washington may run screaming like an amputation is under way, but it’s just a shave.

Bush’s 2007 budget proposal calls for a cut in domestic spending of – are you ready for this? – a whopping 0.5 percent. Mind you, this is not the usual Washington definition of a “cut,” which is to say that it is merely less than the expected increase. We are talking about actually spending 0.5 percent less than is being spent in 2006 in these same areas.

Wow. Sounds like a huge development - except for the fact that the overall federal budget Bush proposes is a record $2.77 trillion, and that defense and anti-terror spending is an unprecedented $439.3 billion – as it should be. It’s not as if Washington’s check-writing is decreasing in an overall sense by any means.

But for any area of the federal budget to actually decrease is almost unheard of. So unheard of, in fact, that the prospect of it actually happening – however unlikely once negotiations with Congress play out – is inspiring some mighty hyperbole.

In its report on the budget proposal, Reuters references the “budget knife” facing various departments. What kind of knife only removes a half-percent of its intended target? Even paring knives are very efficient at cutting small items of fruit and human thumbs right in half. Bigger knives slice right through potatoes, carrots and onions, rendering them virtually unrecognizable.

I have a big knife in my kitchen that cuts apart huge chicken pieces and can even remove bones. This is the kind of stuff you can do with knives.

A half-percent cut in domestic spending? You call that knife work? No self-respecting piece of cutlery would be caught dead associating with such small-time cutting, with the possible exception of the potato peeler, and no one in the knife set respects the potato peeler. In fact, they refer to it derisively as the “potatoe peeler” because it reminds them of Dan Quayle.

What Bush is proposing here is nothing more than a shave. A reduction of 0.5 percent in domestic spending will probably grow back by 5 p.m. The domestic budget won’t even be able to kiss its date that night because it will be scratchy before it gets her home. (Then she’ll sneak out later with the defense budget, which looks all manly with its thick beard. And it carries a knife around!)

Domestic spending cuts have to start somewhere. We might have expected them to start a tad bit earlier than the sixth year of simultaneous Republican rule over the executive and legislative branches, but any time is better than never.

Bush has never been the type of conservative who believes that the government that governs best governs least. It is more his style to try to use government spending to achieve conservative aims. Republican leaders in Congress, once they discovered how much fun it is to control the purse strings, were happy to play along so long as they could earmark funds for projects to benefit their districts and secure their re-election.

The only real objection to this state of affairs has come from so-called “fiscal conservatives” – the folks who raise concerns about budget deficits, and decry heavy spending and earmarks in the abstract, but rarely object to specific spending initiatives. And since Democrats can’t very well claim they would spend less if given the chance, the Republican big-spending era tends to go on pretty well unchecked.

Until now, when Bush has decided it’s time to apply a little shaving cream (actually, the gel works better) and run that triple-blade razor across the thing a time or two. Why now?

The view here is that Bush is very particular about how and where he spends his political capital. He has always believed domestic spending should be cut. But fighting terrorism, reforming social security, enacting new energy policies and fighting for conservative judicial appointments were higher priorities to him. So he kept spending, figuring he’d get around to the issue eventually. Now, with only three budgets left to submit in his presidency, it’s time to get moving on the issue. Or it will pass him by entirely.

Granted, a cut of only 0.5 percent in only the domestic portion of the budget is not what a lot of us think of as getting moving. But if economic growth continues at a minimum of 3.5 percent per quarter, a merely stagnant domestic budget might eventually start to look like someone took a knife to it. OK, a Swiss army knife at most. But it’s still a more decisive cutting action than the mere shave Bush has proposed for 2007 – even if you do soon see Democrats running around screaming like they just slashed their Adam’s Apples. Cut them some slack. They’re not very experienced at shaving.

This is Column # DC19. Request permission to publish here.