A national budget is a statement about our values and priorities as a nation. On Feb. 3, 2004, President Bush presented his proposed budget to the U.S. Congress. It slashes programs to create jobs, to provide health care for Americans and to strengthen public education. Instead, Bush proposes to funnel money to the wealthiest of Americans and supports more “outsourcing” of American jobs.
Just four years ago, the U.S. had a $236 billion surplus that we were using to strengthen Social Security by paying down America’s debt. Today, we are faced with a budget that creates the largest deficit in the history of the U.S. Worse, Bush’s budget is wholly dishonest. Its numbers are cooked for political purposes and it fails to include the out-ofcontrol costs of the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bush budget will not create jobs
Bush claims his budget will create jobs. He has to at least pretend it will because he has the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover. Over the last three years, the U.S. has lost three million jobs. And his projections of jobs created by his policies are at best delusionary—at worst, just more lies.
The Bush budget will only make a bad situation worse. It cuts $286 million from job training and employment services, on top of the $1.5 billion in cuts to job training and related services Bush has proposed since he took office. It also puts funds for adult and dislocated workers programs in block grants to states, jeopardizing the few remaining resources to retrain laid off workers for other occupations.
More money for the greedy
Two million Americans are expected to exhaust their unemployment benefits over the coming months. The Republicans refuse to extend these benefits to the needy because they want more money for the greedy. To do that Bush proposes to make his expiring tax cuts permanent at a cost of $131.6 billion over five years. The budget would give away approximately $1 trillion of tax cuts to the wealthy over the next 10 years.
Under Bush’s plan, the wealthiest five percent of Americans would receive nearly half of the payoff from the trillion-dollar tax cut, more than what the bottom 90 percent of American households receive.
The budget includes tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas. Bush’s economic report as well as his chief economic advisor Gregory Mankiw said it was good to send jobs out of the country. Bush’s report says “The loss of work to other countries, while painful in the short term, will enrich our economy eventually.”
Encouraging outsourcing
In Bush’s State of the Union Address Jan. 20 he said, “Much of our job growth will be found in high-skilled fields like health care.” But his economic advisor Mankiw said, “We will outsource jobs to lower-wage countries as a way to help control the upward spiral of health care costs in the United States of America.” So Bush lies about trying to create jobs, and then sends his minions out to tell the truth that they are intentionally trying to destroy good-paying jobs because it is good for some corporate bottom line. What planet is this guy from?
Transportation budget “all talk, no action”
Bush fails to fund a part of the budget that economists agree would create jobs—transportation infrastructure. For every $1 billion spent on infrastructure, 47,000 jobs are created. Under the six-year, $256 billion proposal for highway and transit spending unveiled in Bush’s budget, 5.6 million fewer workers would land good jobs that under leading bipartisan proposals in Congress. That plan would create about twice the number of jobs Bush has destroyed since he took office.
“The budget is all talk, no action when it comes to meeting the transportation needs of our country,” Ed Wytkind, President of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO said. “Instead of fixing crumbling roads and bridges, improving and expanding public transit and Amtrak, and making air travel safer and more efficient, President Bush has put forward a budget blueprint that is heavy on rhetoric, but light on accomplishment.”
On other infrastructure programs, Bush’s short changes our ports by refusing to adequately fund the Army Corps of Engineers to proceed with critical navigation projects. The marine transportation system is facing a crisis as a result of continued insufficient federal funding for the Corps to perform dredging to deepen channels. The Corps is not maintaining the Port of Redwood City, California which employs ILWU members, because the administration has refused to release money to maintain the channel.
Keeping work places unsafe
Bush’s budget ensures that American workplaces will be dangerous. Adjusting for inflation, Bush proposes to slash the
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