[Chron] - Beware swing of political pendulum

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May 14, 2005, 10:15PM
Beware dangerous swing of this political pendulum
By NEAL PEIRCE

HAVE our national politics reached a rightmost apogee, a "conservative" extreme in the progression of the great American pendulum as it swings from right and left, conservative and liberal through our history?

If the budget resolution Congress has just passed is any measure, we'd better hope the answer is "yes," that moderation will start a comeback — soon. The new budget's implications for states, cities, students, the poor, indeed anyone save the rich, seem grim indeed.

The ferocious hits are in spending on so-called "discretionary" domestic programs. Included are federal grants for education, housing, natural resources, environmental protection, homeland security, veterans' health care and more. Funding for these would be cut by $32 billion, or 5.9 percent, in inflation-adjusted dollars for fiscal 2006. The cuts would then rise year-by-year to $59 billion, or 13.5 percent, in 2010.

The total five-year reduction would amount to $212 billion — over a fifth of a trillion dollars — according to calculations by the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And because the budget assumes increases in homeland security, the other domestic programs in the group would have to be cut by proportionately even greater amounts.

On top of that, the Medicaid program providing health care for low-income families would be chopped back about $10 billion. And there would be cuts in agriculture — but mostly by eliminating 300,000 or so low-income people from the food stamp program, with only $3 billion lost by the big-time farmers who now scoop up subsidies up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

What about defense spending? Outlays for the Pentagon and international programs would be allowed to rise by $185 billion over five years (not even counting the supplemental bills for Iraq and Afghanistan now pending).

So does all this add up to the fiscal discipline, the long-term deficit cutting that the congressional leadership claims?

Hardly. The budget assumes $70 billion in still more tax cuts on top of extending the dividend and capital gains cuts first enacted in 2003 (over half of which are flowing to families with $1 million-plus in annual income). Overall, reports Center on Budget and Policy Priorities director Robert Greenstein, the budget will force deficits to rise $168 billion over the next five years, adding on to deficits the Congressional Budget Office has already projected.

"This budget," Greenstein charges, "digs the deficit hole deeper and passes more debt on to future generations, while using budget cuts aimed at the poor and vulnerable to help finance tax breaks for the well-off and the well-connected."

Indeed, unless the political pendulum starts a swing back soon, we can look to a decade or more of seriously curtailed housing assistance, less food for the needy, less job training, less student aid, less environmental protection, less medical care, even less care for Iraq War veterans.

And to think — all this is the political will of a president and congressional majority who wrap themselves in the mantle of pro-family, God-fearing morals!

Refreshingly, leaders of major U.S. religious denominations (Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, United Church of Christ) are insisting the budget ought to be a moral document reflecting our deepest national commitments — especially concern for the least among us. They've called on Congress to rescind its action and start again.

Of course, those aren't the conservative denominations that the current Republican majority targeted so effectively in last year's elections.

It's alarming to note this terrifying schism and animosity, not just in an ideologically divided nation but between the leaders of our political parties today. The Democrats on the Senate-House conference committee on the budget, for example, were frozen out of decision-making sessions.

In all the congressional maneuvering of recent weeks, about the only victory for states and cities has been resistance to the Bush administration effort to move the Community Development Block Grant program to the Commerce Department, away from its historic home in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But CDBG funding may still be vulnerable. Washington's fiscal adventurism may force still more rounds of painful state and city budget cutting. The long-term hurt, not just for the poor but in an imperiled natural environment, lagging schools, lack of college opportunities, and failure to "green" our national and local energy policies to gain independence from Middle East oil, may be deep and lasting.

When the Republicans' raw and incollegial use of power backfires — and in time it will — one can only hope the Democrats won't play tit for tat but instead give ear to the valid policy concerns of their opposition.

Now, even when Republicans raise seemingly legitimate questions about accountability and results in federal programs — under the Bush administration's so-called "Strengthening America's Communities Initiative," for example — their willingness to savage the basic funding poisons the dialogue.

No matter when the political pendulum next swings, we ought to do a lot better.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3182522