(Guardian) Going for broke

Economic dispatch
Going for broke

President Bush's travesty of a budget manages to simultaneously bash the poor while making the rich feel good about their wealth, writes William Keegan

Tuesday February 8, 2005

None of the movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos thought the Bush administration was serious about cutting the budget deficit, and they appear to have been right.

The President's budget proposal, published yesterday, is a travesty of a budget - even before an irate Congress gets its hands on it. The proposed cuts in spending are confined to non-security discretionary outlays - that part of total spending which comprises a mere 20 per cent of the total. And the most prominent victims are the urban poor, who will suffer from cuts in health, education, housing and other welfare programmes, while the first-term tax cuts for the rich are made permanent.

True, there are proposals for cutting agricultural subsidies, which will be approved by most economists other than those employed by the agricultural lobby, but the broad thrust of the budget is to bash the poor while making the rich feel good about their wealth. And, in the immortal words of the Miami columnist Dave Barry ( who will be sorely missed on this side of the Atlantic too, if he really is about to retire ), "I am not making this up".

Consider: as I took the train down the mountain slopes of Davos, I was joined (in the sense that they took the three unoccupied seats in my compartment) by a prominent US economist and two of his colleagues. Among the great man's ex cathedra statements, which I could not help listening to, was his view that the degree to which the Bush administration had proved to be a welfare programme for the already rich was obscene, but it did not seem to be a subject people talked about. In the land that gave us The Great Gatsby, it was simply accepted that these people had a right to their permanent tax cuts.
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Too bad this forum is not as "sexy" as GENERAL or LBN and does not get the attention deserved.

but I figured it would get locked, deleted or just ignored.

The good thing is it will probably stay on the front page, here, longer.

Oh well.:evilfrown: