OUR WARTIME BUDGET….Matt Yglesias is puzzled that Senators Hollings and McCain, having failed to kill President Bush’s tax plan entirely, also refused to vote to cut the plan in half. Isn’t half a loaf better than none?
I dunno, and neither the Washington Post, the New York Times, nor the Los Angeles Times can be bothered to explain why they voted the way they did. Hooray for the media!
In other, um, disturbing budget news, here’s a paragraph from the New York Times story:
The White House has not yet asked Congress to approve money for the war, and administration officials have refused to say how much it might cost. Republicans said the president did not want his tax cut jeopardized by concerns about war costs.
You know, that’s exactly how LBJ got himself into trouble ? refusing to properly account for war costs because he didn’t want to jeopardize passage of his Great Society programs ? and we paid the price for that folly for a long time. But then, Bush has never exactly been a student of history, even when he really was a student of history.
And then there’s this from the Washington Post story:
The Senate approved a proposal by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) to double, to $1.8 billion, the allocation for the Amtrak passenger rail system.
Amtrak spending doubled! That’s a wartime budget for you! And this:
Voting largely along party lines, the Senate rejected proposals by New York’s senators to increase spending on homeland security by $5 billion or more this year and $88 billion over the next 11 years.
I’m happy to see that, once again, President Bush has placed the safety of his tax cuts over the safety of the American people.
