Converts to any cause are the most obnoxious people in the world. Whatever the issue, they think they’re the first ones in history to get it – be it religion, exercise or morality. They never stop bragging, and they never stop showing off.
Case in point. Once Democrats took control of Congress in January, George W. Bush suddenly became a convert to the presidential veto. And he’s been shaking it like a baby with a new rattle ever since.
During his first five years in office, Bush did not exercise his veto power at all. Most notably, despite soaring budget deficits and pledges of fiscal responsibility, he did not veto one single spending bill passed by the Republican Congress. His first veto, on expanding federal funding of stem-cell research, didn’t come till September 2006. A month before vetoing a second stem-cell bill, in June 2007, he vetoed a timeline for bringing American troops home from Iraq.
Bush’s first spending veto didn’t come until last month, when he rejected expansion of the children’s health program. Since then, he’s laid down one veto – soon overridden by Congress – on legislation to fund new water projects, including construction of higher levees along the Katrina-battered Gulf coast. He’s vetoed a second measure for education, health care and job training. And he threatens to veto any new Iraq funding that includes a timetable for troop withdrawal, as well as any bill that increases domestic spending. Democrats are spending money so fast, Bush told a group of Indiana business leaders, they remind him of “a teenager with a brand new credit card.”
See what I mean about converts? Given his record of the last seven years, Bush’s sudden reappearance as a born-again fiscal conservative is actually laugh-out-loud funny.
Let the facts speak for themselves. In seven years, Bush has not once balanced the budget, nor presented a balanced budget to Congress. He took office with a $236 billion surplus, which he quickly turned into a $413 billion deficit. The projected deficit for 2008 is still $180 billion, not counting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the money we are borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund.
Bush’s record of fiscal profligacy continues. The federal budget in 2001 was $1.9 trillion; today, it’s $2.7 trillion. Under Bush and a Republican Congress, the national debt has soared from 5.8 trillion to $9 trillion – 25 percent of which is owned by China, Japan and the UK. It took 42 presidents 224 years to build up $1 trillion of foreign-held debt. It’s taken George Bush just seven years to accumulate $1.22 trillion.
Looking for a teenager bingeing on a credit card? He’s the one. Working mostly with a Republican Congress, George Bush has delivered the biggest federal budget ever, plus the biggest federal deficits, biggest federal workforce and biggest federal government. Quite simply, he’s the biggest federal spender in history. And suddenly he’s preaching to Democrats about fiscal responsibility?
Of course, it’s the open-ended war in Iraq that’s the biggest ticket on Bush’s credit card – and its cost may be almost double what the administration claims. The White House estimates the combined cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be $804 billion. But that’s just the amount of money directly appropriated by Congress. According to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, when you also count indirect costs, such as higher oil prices, economic disruptions and loss of productive investments, the total costs of both wars is actually $1.5 trillion – or $20,200 for every family of four in America. And, without a plan to pay for the war, that $1.5 trillion is piled onto our already overloaded national debt.
Bottom line: It’s too late for George Bush to pretend to be a fiscal conservative. The road back to fiscal responsibility does not begin with Bush’s shaking his veto pen at the Democrats, but instead with Democrats’ exercising their own veto – on his endless war.
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WND Staff