Bush Fiscal 2009 Budget Blogging, Part 2
A "Why bother?" is what you get when you go into a Starbucks and order a decaf coffee with extra sugar and extra milk.
It's also what you get why you look at the Bush fiscal 2009 budget.
Less than 12 hours after it was sent to Congress earlier today, the Bush FY09 budget is already largely considered irrelevant. A quick (and totally unscientific) survey this afternoon of some of my budget friends on both sides of the aisle resulted in a rather amazing finding: no one cared about what the White House was proposing, thought it would be followed in any way, or that would have any impact on this year's budget debate. The word I kept hearing was "irrelevant."
Some of this was to be expected. This was, after all, the final budget of a lame duck president being submitted to a Congress controlled by the other party, and that party seems to think it is increasingly likely to pick up a substantial number of seats in the next election. Regardless of what the president proposed, his budget was likely to be treated roughly when it was received on Capital Hill.
But the Bush administration made things tougher for itself by proposing a budget that it had to know wouldn't be taken seriously. Money for Iraq and Afghanistan that everyone knows will be spent wasn't included for fiscal 2010 - 2013. Even the president's preferred plan to have a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq at a cost of $30 billion or so a year wasn't included...and that's the least-cost alternative.
The president's budget also did not assume that the alternative minimum tax would be fixed beyond a 2009 temporary patch even though that is as certain as anything can be in politics. As a result, for 2010-2013, the budget includes around $65 billion a year in revenues that will never be collected.
The budget also assumes that domestic appropriations will be frozen in nominal terms from 2009 to 2013, which is laughable no matter who is elected president and which party is in control of the House and Senate.
Why make so many off-the-wall assumptions? Because they allow the White House to do the only thing it wanted to accomplish with this budget: project a surplus in 2012.
The fact that the numbers are phony doesn't matter: on paper the budget shows a surplus in 2012.
The fact that the White House won't get even a polite reception for the policies included in the budget doesn't matter: on paper it shows a surplus in 2012.
And the fact that everyone is laughing at the budget and the White House that produced it doesn't matter: on paper it shows a surplus in 2012.
What this tells you is that the Bush administration is now out of the federal budget business.
It has already gotten all it needs to get out of its fiscal 2009 budget and doesn't have to submit another one before the president leaves office next year.
