Editorial: Misguided priorities

Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2005 | 8:58 a.m.

If Vice President Dick Cheney is to be believed, great care went into the $2.57 trillion federal budget that President Bush has submitted to Congress. On Sunday, the day before Bush's proposed federal budget was unveiled, Cheney told Fox News that "it's not something that we've done with a meat ax, nor are we suddenly turning our backs on the most needy people in our society."

With a few exceptions, such as Bush's worthy plan to reduce farm subsidies that have tended to benefit agribusiness corporations more than family farmers, it looks as if he did take a meat cleaver to the budget, proposing the elimination of 150 federal programs. Take a look at education, where Bush wants to eliminate 48 programs and reduce spending on 16 others, money that he says could be better spent elsewhere, such as boosting the funding for federal grants that will help more poor students attend college.

But it's terribly shortsighted to end programs that provide grants to states to further vocational education and help keep drugs out of schools, especially when another option exists to avoid such Draconian cuts. The president, rather than advocating that Congress make permanent his previously enacted tax cuts that benefit wealthy Americans the most, could let the tax cuts expire and apply part of the savings -- totaling $1.3 trillion over the next decade -- toward essential government programs.

It's also aggravating that Bush has presented a budget full of smoke and mirrors. For example, the budget will not include the nearly $80 billion he is expected to seek in coming weeks to pay for the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a ruse to make the federal deficit look smaller than it actually is.

A president's budget, not the lofty speeches he gives, reveals his political soul. Bush's proposed deep cuts in government spending and his accounting gimmickry tell us that he is neither the compassionate conservative nor the fiscal conservative he has always claimed to be.