The Future is Now!

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February 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Vanishing Future
By PAUL KRUGMAN
At this point we've had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget chicanery. (Yes, six years: George W. Bush's special mix of blatant dishonesty and gross irresponsibility was fully visible during the 2000 presidential campaign.) What still amazes me, however, is the sheer childishness of the administration's denials and deceptions.

Consider the case of the vanishing future.

The story begins in 2001, when President Bush was pushing his first tax cut through Congress. At the time, the administration insisted that its tax-cut plans wouldn't endanger the budget surplus bequeathed to Mr. Bush by Bill Clinton. But even some Republican senators were skeptical. So the Senate demanded a cap on the tax cut: it should not reduce revenue over the period from 2001 to 2011 by more than $1.35 trillion.

The administration met this requirement, but not by scaling back its tax-cutting ambitions. Instead, it created fictitious savings by "sunsetting" the tax cut, making the whole thing expire at the end of 2010.

This was obviously silly. For example, under the law as written there will be no federal tax on the estates of wealthy people who die in 2010. But the estate tax will return in 2011 with a maximum rate of 55 percent, creating some interesting incentives.

I suggested, back in 2001, that the legislation be renamed the Throw Momma From the Train Act.

It was also obvious that the administration had no intention of abiding by its concession to fiscal prudence, that it would try to eliminate the sunset clause and make the tax cuts permanent.

But it quickly became clear that the budget forecasts the administration used to justify the 2001 tax cut were wildly overoptimistic. The federal government faced a future of deficits, not surpluses, as far as the eye could see. Making the tax cut permanent would greatly worsen those future deficits. What were budget officials to do?

You almost have to admire their brazenness: they made the future disappear.

Clinton-era budgets offered 10-year projections of spending and revenues. But the Bush administration slashed the budget horizon to five years. This artificial shortsightedness greatly aided the campaign to make the 2001 tax cut permanent because it hid the costs: since budget analyses no longer covered the years after 2010, the revenue losses from extending the tax cut became invisible.

But now it's 2006, and even a five-year projection covers the period from 2007 to 2011, which means including a year in which making the Bush tax cuts permanent will cost a lot of revenue — $119.7 billion, but who's counting? Has the administration finally run out of ways to avoid budget reality?

Not quite. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, until this year budget documents contained a standard table titled "Impact of Budget Policy," which summarized the effects of the administration's tax and spending proposals on future outlays and revenues. But this year, that table is missing. So you have to do some detective work to figure out what's really going on.

Now, the administration has proposed spending cuts that are both cruel and implausible. For example, administration computer printouts obtained by the center show that the budget calls for a 13 percent cut in spending on veterans' health care, adjusted for inflation, over the next five years.

Yet even these cuts would fall far short of making up for the revenue losses from making the tax cuts permanent. The administration's own estimate, which can be deduced from its budget tables, is that extending the tax cuts would cost an average of $235 billion in each year from 2012 through 2016.

In other words, the administration has no idea how to make its tax cuts feasible in the long run. Yet it has never, as far as I can tell, allowed unfavorable facts to affect its determination to make the tax cuts permanent. Instead, it has devoted all its efforts to hiding those awkward facts from public view. (Any resemblance to, say, its Iraq strategy is no coincidence.)

At this point the administration's budget strategy seems to be simply to ignore reality. The 2007 budget makes it clear, once and for all, that the tax cuts can't be offset with spending cuts. But Bush officials have decided to ignore that unpleasant fact, and let some future administration deal with the mess they have created.
copyright NY Times

The "Reverse-Robin Hood" Budget.

Barney Frank said today on the Chris Matthews show that what is becoming clear is that the Bush Administration's lack of a real plan in New Orleans will act as "ethnic cleansing by inaction." The Bush budget certainly plays that out, as there are no funds for the efforts down there, and even as hotels throw the refugees out in places where they know no one; places where they arrived by bus with nothing but the clothes on their backs, we must demand to know what happened to the promises of this administration to help everyone affected by this worst disaster in history.
Instead we see further tax cuts for the richest in the country and an incredible amount of dollars still set aside to privatize Medicare (a plan that was supposedly "dead." I am going to do some research on that and will update later...here you go!)
I am so tired of being lied to... Tired of watching the neediest in our society left behind while this administration continues to reward big business and the richest Americans.
This is not what America is, and I take offense at how a small slice of the most radical neocons have been able to manipulate fear into votes that run contrary to what would benefit the majority of Americans. Why would lower income Americans go for this crowd? They were, in a well planned campaign, made to feel unsafe and as if they were less than patriotic if they voted for their own well-being. They made a sacrifice for the war and for the safety of all Americans. Where is the sacrifice of the richest Americans? Why is this Administration run on the backs of the middle and lower classes? Why is their manufactured privatized war fought by low income Americans when we clearly need more soldiers?
We have let these people change our Supreme Court, neglect our old and needy citizens, privatize a war that is a fiasco, cut benefits for our military, stand by while people literally died in the aftermath of Katrina, and continue to appoint unqualified cronys to jobs that require special skills, thus making us much more unsafe. What next?...Oh yes, they continually break the law and they try to destroy anyone who disagrees with them.
The list goes on and on...And I, and 60 % of other Americans are sick of it!
We must take back the House and Senate in the mid-term elections this year so that at least we can have hearings to try to figure out what has really gone on in this criminal administration. We must begin to rebuild our diplomatic standing in the world and, most importantly, to take care of our needy brothers and sisters. They are, in many ways, us, and we all are only a bad illness or tragedy of some sort away from being in the same place as they are.
These things are all moral issues, and a religious person might say that Jesus would never support what has been going on in this country since Bush and Co. took office!
Lets try to leave something for our children to be proud of: Air they can breathe, a country where people have secure jobs, medical care, education, and a place to live. And lets restore truth and honesty to the government and reverse the diplomatic mess that we have found us in throughout the world.
This budget is a nightmare and it indicates that this Administration expects to dish out more of the same. We have to take back the power to turn back the tide that is pulling under our values and our history, leaving in its wake some mangled, privatized world that is unrecognizable.
Bush lied to us during his State of the Union speech, clearly stating one thing and then turning around and doing another. The truth is not convenient to these people and they seem to think they are above the law.
It is unsettling, and we are not going to let this go by without bringing these lies to light.

I'm In!!

I am so tickled by this Kristof blog and its offshoot to the NY Times online that I have to post it here. Ive pledged money to send O'Reilly to Darfur to help with his education and understanding of the world. We should all help O'Reilly get out in the world a bit and learn something!

Kristof's weblog now tells us that the pledges are coming in so fast that they crashed the gmail account they set up for it! Ha!

February 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Helping Bill O'Reilly
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Please, readers, help Bill O'Reilly!

After Mr. O'Reilly denounced me in December as a "left-wing ideologue" (a charge that alarmed me, given his expertise on ideologues), I challenged him to defend traditional values by joining me on a trip to Darfur. I wrote: "You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared ... and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause."

A few days ago, I finally got my answer. Mr. O'Reilly declared in his column: "I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio. There's no way I can go to Africa."

No need to give up so easily, Bill. With a satellite phone, you can do your show from anywhere.

But maybe Mr. O'Reilly's concern is cost, so I thought my readers might want to give him a hand. You can help sponsor a trip by Mr. O'Reilly to Darfur, where he can use his television savvy to thunder against something actually meriting his blustery rage.

If you want to help, send e-mail to sponsorbill@gmail.com or snail mail to me at The Times, and tell me how much you're willing to pay for Mr. O'Reilly's expenses in Darfur. Offers will be anonymous, except maybe to the N.S.A. Don't send money; all I'm looking for is pledges. I'll post updates at nytimes.com/ontheground.

(Note: pledges cannot be earmarked. It is not possible to underwrite only Mr. O'Reilly's outgoing ticket to Darfur without bringing him home as well.)

Sure, this is a desperate measure. But with several hundred thousand people already murdered in Darfur and two million homeless and living in shantytowns, the best hope for those still alive is a strong dose of American outrage.

Worse, all the horrors that we've already seen in Darfur may be remembered only as the prelude. Security in the region is deteriorating, African Union peacekeepers are becoming targets, and the U.N. has warned that if humanitarian agencies are forced out, the death toll may rise to 100,000 per month.

Just as dangerous, the government-supported janjaweed — the brutal militia responsible for the slaughter — is now making regular raids across the border into Chad. There is a growing risk that Chad will collapse into war as well, hugely increasing the death toll and spreading chaos across a much larger region.

Last week, the United Nations agreed to plan for an international force. It will be nice if the force materializes — but even that half-step is probably almost a year away. The solution isn't American ground forces, but a starting point would be American resolve to put genocide at the top of the international agenda. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush barely lets the word "Darfur" past his lips.

The best way for President Bush to honor Coretta Scott King isn't simply to recite platitudes at her funeral today, but to push loudly and forcefully to stop genocide. Was the essential message of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about the need to be seen at funerals? Or about standing up to injustice, like a genocide in which infants are grabbed from their mothers' arms and tossed onto bonfires?

The reality is that the only way the White House will move on Darfur is if it is flooded with calls from the public — and that will happen only when the genocide is brought home to living rooms around America.

According to the Tyndall Report, which analyzes the content of the evening newscasts of the broadcast networks, their coverage of Darfur actually declined last year. The total for all three networks was 26 minutes in 2004. That wasn't much — but it dropped to just 18 minutes during all of 2005.

ABC's evening news program had 11 minutes about Darfur over the year, NBC's had 5 minutes, and CBS's found genocide worth only 2 minutes of airtime during the course of 2005.

In contrast, the networks gave the Michael Jackson trial in 2005 a total of 84 minutes of coverage. There aren't comparable figures for cable networks like Fox, but Mr. O'Reilly and other cable newscasters pretty much ignored the Darfur catastrophe.

Mr. O'Reilly has a big audience and a knack for stirring outrage. Lately, he (quite properly) galvanized an outcry over a ridiculously light sentence for a sexual predator in Vermont. The upshot was that the sentence was increased. Good stuff!

So imagine the furor Mr. O'Reilly could stir up if he publicized the hundreds of thousands of rapes, murders and mutilations in Darfur. He could save lives on a grand scale.

Join the pledge drive! I'm starting with my own $1,000 pledge to sponsor Mr. O'Reilly's trip. Please help.

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For more on the exchanges with Mr. O'Reilly, see Mr. Kristof's weblog.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

I am a Patriot

I'm hanging round the Military Armory Barracks in Norwalk CT which seems strange to me in the best of circumstances. I guess you could call this a remote blog entry from the scene of one of our military recruitment and staging bunkers here in Connecticut. It’s a muddy, rainy day, way too warm for this not to have something to do with global warming, and I’m thinking of a wall of water and ice barreling down Wall street towards the hiding place of the only survivors of the bird flu. My son plays a game called Warhammer which involves little soldiers in big, expensive armies, from a far distant past or future, which is very different with lots of craggy terrain, dice and, measuring devices.
I guess that a lot of our real soldiers are what they call Gamers. When the local gaming store that was one of the only Gamer hangs in the area closed down, the soldier Gamers offered this post as the host for once a month gaming. In return they would display their recruitment material to the youngsters playing there. So here we are again with the recruiter soldiers who were left behind rattling round the barracks when their unit got called up to go somewhere (and I’m thinking that its New Orleans.)

They try to drum up business in a poor part of a blue town that’s on the eastern edge of a very blue state. It’s a lonely job and if it weren’t for the inner city kids around here, it would be totally dead enlistment-wise. I can tell that some of these guys feel pretty bad. But I can also tell that some of them are blindly following the commander in chief. The Warhammer kids are largely white middle to upper class geeky boys who are not military material…and are liberals anyway, so they make snide comments about the commander and the whole thing has apparently gotten some of the soldiers upset.

The gaming personality is part slacker and part OCD, with a certain geek thing going on. These are kids who can learn the whole Klingon language but maybe have a little trouble figuring out exactly the invisible social space line. There is this naïve inner self of pretend that doesn’t seem to grow away with time and too many of these kids seem to grow up without outgrowing their fantasy worlds. I understand escapism but the trouble with me is that, once I got past a certain age, I lost my ability to submerge enough in make believe to forget that the world was grinding along out there. I need to be aware and worried and involved. Also, what is fantastic for a teenager becomes pretty sad as these guys get up into their 30's and beyond.

So, here we find our soldiers ensconced in a lot of war play, be it video gaming, fantasy D&D, or this Warhammer thing. Its very time consuming and I guess they find it relaxing, but it’s a little disconcerting to me to see a table of grown men playing a game that is so involved that it rules out talking about other things during gameplay.

Once a month I find myself at this military installation where the kids play in the truck bay on terrain boards of all kinds, directing their carefully glued and painted soldiers with impossible names like Abadon the Destroyer and Khorne. Dice are rolled, rules are discussed and debated, and points are figured, across the moonscape of epic battles. This goes on for hours as they play a complicated tournament round after round. I go to McDonalds, read the Sunday Paper and run errands. It’s a long day.

When the email announcement came out this month, the guy who is running this club added a spiel about how we have to realize that this is a soldier's place and how we shouldn't express our opinions on politics and we should be careful to respect the soldiers and not hurt their feelings. Someone had said something to a soldier or that a soldier could hear last time and we shouldn’t do that…OK. When we got here the sign out front listed the rules and by far my favorite one was "no politics"...which, of course, totally pisses me off considering that we are in a facility that is paid for with tax dollars and that exists to protect our right to free speech.
The back of my car is covered with bumper stickers, and its parked next to my sister’s car which has some more bumper stickers, and I’ve been wearing a button around since the first year of Bush’s first term. But I was sure that the email wasn’t referring to all of that because, of course, its free speech and I’m supportive of the troops, who mostly, by the way, mirror the country in the polls. If some kid had bothered a soldier then the kid should be barred from the club, but a button or shirt or sticker…? Well, I couldn’t imagine…Cindy Sheehan has just been carried from the SOTU speech for a T shirt that didn’t even say anything! But that was Cindy Sheehan! We cant be losing so much that our military is in the dark as to the constitution that they are defending. So, now that I have read all the laws on this sort of thing which were reported on by all the liberal blogs after the Cindy Sheehan thing, I really am not worried. I wouldn’t go out of my way to voice my opinion, but I also wouldn’t change anything about my usual run around town in jeans self. Hell, I just got a new button with a picture of Bush’s face that says FUCKTARD across it, but I didn’t put that on because I didn’t want to go out of my way to offend or bother anyone.

Well, I wasn't here for ten minutes before I felt the neocon soldier's eyes on my Bush LIAR button and saw that little shake of the head and look that comes from the surety of being right as told by the likes of Rush or O'Reilly. How can he have even found my button so fast? Its like they sweep the room for anything that might upset the President, even in his absence, and a magnetic force drags them to the searing pain of the cross on Dracula’s skin!.

I guess he complained to the guy who runs this thing and the second banana guy waved me over to talk. I told the guy that we might have a very big problem here because he was talking about my right to free speech. I didn't put my button on to come to this place and I certainly am not going to take it off to come here. I was the one who wore these things even before everyone realized how screwed up everything was; before, when it seemed like you were unpatriotic if you didn't support the war....but then, I supported Afghanistan, and I support any war that makes sense. And any war that really makes sense, especially ones that involve humanitarian actions, are usually supported by the UN (which may have prevented this whole thing in the first place when the Taliban was first taking hold. But that was about human rights, not…um…oil…er…human rights…um…Democracy!) I think that there are justified wars, but this one unfortunately wasn’t. I made sure that if I was going to make a statement that I knew what was going on so that I could talk about it to the neocon karate instructor and whoever else wandered by in the parking lot.

Above all I am a Patriot and I support fully the real thing that this country stands for and what people have fought and died for: our freedom. If we start shutting up because the government, media, or our community is sending the message that it is wrong to have a different opinion then we are not being truly patriotic. Our country stands for the mix of different opinions that allow for balance, yada, yada, yada…. and I get so furious when I feel the air get heavy and then some disapproving stare...call me a rebel but I'll be damned if I'm going to be silenced by anyone, much less by one red person in a blue state.

So, #2 man comes to tell me that this soldier feels that my Bush LIAR button is a slap in the face. But, of course the soldier wouldn’t come over and tell me himself and they really didn’t want me to go and talk to him. They couldn’t do anything to me and most of them agree with me, but this guy is …um…hurt.
This guy: He is the short one with the belly…he has his hair shaved on the sides and lets it form a muffin top on top. He almost looks like an Easter egg….and he is a touchy guy. I try to understand and I genuinely feel empathy for him, but he is over reacting to a button. It is only words and if he holds the real conviction of loyalty to his commander in chief then no one should be able to upset or sway him from his kool-aid. I realize also that these few guys are here all alone except for times like Katrina when they used this bay to sort supplies brought by the community and there was alot of action. I know that they haven’t been to Iraq and I realize that if this one is bothered so horribly by a button then what might happen if someone yells “go home dirty American” on the streets of Iraq, or an angry flood victim criticizes the response….so, maybe that’s why he has been assigned to stay behind. I don’t think he has the personality to occupy a hostile area.

I am filled with pity and a sort of love for this guy....not so much his tall, blonde co-workers with their muscles, but this little guy who is so sensitive with his muffin hair and paunch. I don’t know what his life might be like on the outside or why he joined up, but this tense afternoon of staring back at him and typing on my new phone with tiny keypad, makes me sad that I cant take off my button for him just so he will feel better. He’s been lied to and his friends are dying. He is clinging to the only thing that makes sense, because the reality of this thing is too horrible to fathom. In a military that prosecutes its lowest enlisted soldiers for crimes from the top rather than look at what’s really wrong in the whole action and institution, I can see how important it would be to have the commander be infallible. So here he is….Poor guy…playing his game…