Do These Deficits Look Familiar?

Meet Richard Milhous Bush

Jonathan Rauch | January 26, 2004

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The administration retorts that most of the spending increases are attributable to the economic downturn, homeland security, and Iraq—exceptional circumstances that required exceptional responses. Fair enough, but a policy isn't exceptional if it goes on forever. "Justifications for borrowing have now run out," says Maya MacGuineas, the executive director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan anti-deficit group. "The higher security-spending needs we have are no longer temporary, economic growth has picked up, and there's really no reason not to pay for all the spending that we decide the government is going to engage in."

Well, there is one reason: Repairing the fiscal breach would require Bush to set priorities and make trade-offs, something he, like Nixon, has been conspicuously reluctant to do. Even Nixon, though, promised in 1969 to produce a sizable ("not token") surplus in five years. "It's remarkable that a Republican administration doesn't even have a plan to at least put the deficit on a glide path to zero," says Chris Edwards, Cato's director of fiscal policy studies. "They just say half in five years."

Given that 2004 is an election year, austerity may be too much to expect when Bush releases his budget next month. But at a bare minimum, says MacGuineas, "you shouldn't see any tax cuts or spending increases that aren't paid for, and in fact you should see a plan for how to put us on a path to budget balance."

In 1972, Nixon faced a choice between political one-upmanship and fiscal grown-upmanship, and we all know which he chose. But Nixon was as crass an opportunist as ever entered American politics. Bush is a better sort of man. Isn't he?