This morning, The American
Spectator hosted a Newsmaker Breakfast with OMB Director and
former Iowa congressman Jim Nussle, during which he emphasized the
need for Congress to vote on Iraq supplemental funding and made his
best attempt to defend the Bush administration's spending record to
a room full of skeptical conservatives.
Citing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Nussle said that if
the pending $108 billion request was not met, the troops would
begin to run out of funds by June 15. When I asked him when the
ultimate drop date was -- i.e. when they could no longer shift
around funds from one account to another to fund the troops - he
said the end of June, or July 4 at the latest.
Nussle argued that normally supplemental bills come up as a
surprise, but this is something that Congress knew was in the
pipeline for 16 months, so they should bring it up for a vote. His
position is that anybody can disagree with the politics of the war,
but once we have troops committed, we have to meet their needs.
Nussle reiterated that President Bush would veto the Farm Bill
immediately upon receiving it in the next day or two, and that
Congress plans to immediately vote on whether to override the
veto.
When Nussle was asked whether deficits matter, he said they do,
but noted different types of deficits. On Sept. 10, he said, we
were running a fiscal surplus, but there was a deficit in our
defense and homeland security capability, which we had to increase.
This is an argument that the Bush administration has employed
consistently to explain away its atrocious spending record, but it
doesn't really fly. Even if one were to concede that all of the
homeland security spending actually went to homeland security -
quite a concession - it doesn't explain the expansion of the rest
of government. Furthermore, if we are to continue with Nussle's
line of logic that we had a defense and homeland security deficit,
did we not have a surplus in other parts of government that could
have been used do pay for the increased defense expenditures? Did
Bush and Republicans need to go through with No Child Left Behind?
Or the Medicare prescription drug bill?
Toward the end of the session, Nussle took issue with a chart
showing that federal spending had skyrocketed by $867 billion
during the Bush years (vs. a $577 billion increase in revenue), by
saying that most of that increase was due to "automatic" (i.e.
mandatory) spending that they had no control over. Quin Hillyer
rightly noted that even discretionary spending growth has far
outpaced the rate of inflation since 2001. Nussle became quite
agitated. I would only add that it's a total copout for the Bush
administration to absolve itself of responsibility for the rise in
mandatory spending, because he had a Republican congress for 6
years and could have pursued entitlement reform. Instead, he pushed
through the largest expansion of entitlements with the Medicare
drug plan, which greatly exacerbated the "automatic" spending
problem.
topics:
Entitlements, Iraq, Medicare
