Bush is a believer. He toured clubs during the campaign. He repeatedly urges businesses to support their efforts. He even donated the $75,000 advance from his autobiography, “A Charge to Keep,” to the BGCA and a couple of other worthy youth-service groups “because I believe so strongly in helping children understand that somebody loves them.” Recently he love-bombed Boys and Girls Clubs again with what may be his highest compliment. Although the clubs are strictly nonsectarian, Bush said: “I view the Boys and Girls Clubs as faith-based programs–based upon the universal concept of loving a neighbor just like you’d like to be loved yourself.”
But there are apparently limits to his love. Last week, five days after using a Boys and Girls Club in inner-city Wilmington, Delaware, as a backdrop for a speech and a photo op, Bush released details of his $1.9 trillion fiscal 2002 federal budget. On page 673, last year’s appropriation for Boys and Girls Clubs of America–$60 million–appears in brackets. The cold budget language explains: “Brackets enclose material that is proposed for deletion.”
Could this have been a simple boo-boo? “I think some of President Bush’s budget cutters got overzealous,” says Robbie Callaway, a vice president of BGCA (which gets 7 percent of its funding from Washington). “I don’t think the president personally meant to cut us.” Probably not, considering that Bush reportedly spent only five hours in meetings about his budget. (President Clinton spent about 10 times as long going over the details.) Aides at the Office of Management and Budget say the cut was not a mistake but part of a broader effort to slice off “earmarks”–those pesky items slipped in the budget by meddlesome members of Congress.
The folks on the Hill obviously haven’t gotten the message that we all need to tighten our belts (even in programs that clearly work and clearly help kids) in order to get rid of this awful deficit that threatens the future of our grandchildren.
Oops. I must have accidentally hit the wrong button and inserted a sentence I wrote about deficit politics in the early 1990s. The Bush team’s soft-shoe presentation of its budget was so clever that I almost forgot that we have a big surplus now. Preserving the $1.6 trillion tax cut is the unstated theme of the budget, but the packaging is subtle. In contrast to previous GOP budgets, Bush’s avoids revolutionary rhetoric about slashing the size of government. That makes it harder for critics to say, “You guys are living in the past!”
And at first glance, the proposed numbers look reasonable enough. Education funding up 11.5 percent (the Democrats, using different baselines, say it’s really 5.7 percent). Boosts for biomedical research. Seventy-one billion dollars in help for the medically uninsured. Corporate-welfare recipients like shipbuilders and agribusiness take a much-needed hit. Overall spending increases a healthy 4.5 percent. What’s not to like?
But on closer inspection, the budget is a numerical version of Bush’s visits to Boys and Girls Clubs: gestures, not answers. On education, the total increase he proposes–$2.1 billion–adds up to one tenth of 1 percent of the federal budget and is a lesser hike than in recent years. His much-heralded tripling of money for early reading comes to $75 million (that’s with an “m”)–better than nothing but hardly worth bragging much about.
The rest of the budget is an elaborately constructed straitjacket on future social spending. Bush’s proposed prescription-drug benefit is paltry next to what Democrats prefer. Anti-poverty funding (including for “faith-based” efforts) is essentially flat. And the Pentagon numbers are cooked. In one of the slickest budget moves in years, Bush doesn’t bother to detail defense expenditures, pending a review by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They hope the tax cut will be unstoppable by then, which means that all of the new defense money that Rumsfeld will no doubt recommend would have to come from other domestic programs. The mix of huge tax cuts and a fear of returning to deficits could make ours a peculiarly cramped era–old-fashioned stinginess in a time of plenty.
In hinting to the Boys and Girls Club of Wilmington why he could not provide more help, Bush said: “I oftentimes tell people I wish I could sign a law that says we’ll love each other like we’d like to be loved ourselves. That’s not the role of government.” But having established that the clubs do provide that love, could it not be the role of government to help it bloom more widely? Bush admitted as much by putting some money in his budget for a new program to mentor the children of prisoners. He is sincere in his commitment to helping at-risk kids, but groping to find the courage of his compassion. In 1989 his father, afflicted by the deficit, lamented in his Inaugural address that “we have more will than wallet.” Today we have more wallet than will.
