February 6, 2007

You can see Bush’s skewed priorities when you examine his proposed budget.

He wants to spend $481 billion on the Pentagon next year, and that doesn’t even include the $145 billion he is requesting for his little adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the objective of the Project for a New American Century to get Pentagon spending up to $500 billion a year. With this budget request, it now will stand at $626 billion. And that doesn’t even include the tens of billions of dollars that the Department of Energy spends on nuclear weapons.

Then there are the tax cuts to Bush and Cheney’s rich friends—you know, the people Bush called “his base” in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911.

Bush’s budget would give people with incomes of more than $1 million an average tax cut of $162,000 a year by 2012, while those in the middle fifth of the income scale would get a mere $840 a year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Here’s another way of looking at the lopsided distribution of tax benefits: The top 1 percent would enjoy 31 percent of the tax cuts, the bottom 40 percent just 4 percent, the center points out.

That’s redistribution of income, from bottom to top.

Meantime, Bush is proposing cutting aid to low-income people struggling to pay high winter heating bills. Here in the Upper Midwest, as well as New England, we’re in the deep freeze now, and we’re feeling the pinch of high heating bills already. People need relief from these bills, and Bush wants to take it away.

Bush would also cut child-care assistance for 300,000 kids from poor families over the next three years, and he’s giving states an incentive to push these kids off the CHIP program that gives them insurance, the center says. Bush would also gouge Headstart by $100 million from the level in the continuing resolution passed by the House, the center notes. And “the preventive health services block grant, which helps state and local agencies undertake efforts to prevent or reduce the incidence of various health problems such as obesity and lead poisoning, would be eliminated.”

This is unbelievable. Bush is giving the top 1 percent huge tax breaks while he’s making the impoverished elderly suffer in the cold winter and he’s exposing kids to more lead poisoning.

Other cuts, the center says, are in funding for elementary secondary education (including for special ed and drug-free programs), low-income housing, housing for poor people with disabilities, pollution control and abatement, health care research and training, and money for the prevention and prosecution of violence against women.

Budget time is supposed to be when we, as a community of citizens, get together to decide what our priorities are. For Bush, these priorities are making war and feeding the rich. Everything else is on the chopping block.