How Can We Afford Bush's Recovery?

Curt Day

After listening to parts of President Bush’s speech promising to rebuild the devastated areas of the Gulf States, I had a dream. President Bush was watching TV in his apartment. He is wearing a tee-shirt with a map of the 50 states and the words “Big Spender” printed in bold below the map. There is a knock at the door. President Bush gruffly asks: “Who is it?” “Candygram” was the reply. Our culturally illiterate President leaps up and rushes to answer the door. As the door opens, tragedy strikes! Was it a resurrected SNL Landshark returning to devour new prey? No, it was a loan shark demanding payment.

How long was President Bush’s speech on September 15th? It was reported that his speech was over 20 minutes. But that is not correct. The right answer is that his speech was too short. His speech was too short because the most critical part of his speech was missing. Though President Bush promised to rebuild the area, his speech was incomplete.

The next day, President Bush tried to complete his speech. Here he described how we were going to pay for the reconstruction. But answering how we are going to pay was not the right question to address. The correct question to ask is how can we possibly afford to pay for what President Bush is proposing?

How can we afford to pay the higher price of reconstruction when we could not afford to pay the lower price of maintenance? The Bush Administration began slashing funds meant to maintain the levees in 2004. The reductions were caused by the Iraq War and tax cuts. So how can we now pay hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild when we were not able to afford hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain the levees before?

How can we afford to rebuild the Gulf States when our deficit is so high and there is no light at the end of the spending tunnel? Is the money funding our deficit coming from Santa Clause’s bottomless gift bag or is there a point where our deficit causes our economy to collapse?

How can we afford to rebuild the Gulf States when we have to spend so much on taming and rebuilding Iraq? We could always leave Iraq to make room in the budget for this new venture. But if we did, what would the people of New Orleans think? Would they believe that he will keep his promise to them after seeing him break his promise to Iraq? Would another crisis cause President Bush to tell the people of the Gulf States to lift themselves up by their bootstraps?

How can we afford to rebuild the Gulf States when we have excused those who are most able to fund the reconstruction from paying their fair share in taxes? Will Corporate America and the rich surrender Tax Cut Hill after they fought so hard to capture it in the first place? Will they surrender this hill knowing that they will only want to recapture it as soon as possible? Can we expect Corporate America and the rich to surrender this hill after they have hired many mercenaries from the Conservative Army to defend it? Will those who never learned from Martin Luther King Jr. that “Capitalism forgets that life is social” surrender their most prized piece of real estate? President Bush has already stated that this hill will not be surrendered.

Maybe we can afford to rebuild the Gulf States after all. We could cut funding to the other states. Of course this can only increase the deficits of the many states whose budgets are already in the red. And we should note that state budget deficits were already growing. These states will probably adjust by cutting funding for the needy, education, and infrastructure. The Federal government could also help by imitating these actions.

We should take our hats off to President Bush. This is because our nation’s plight can only be described by using a combination of stories. One story is not enough. It seems that President Bush is playing the role of the little Dutch boy who cried wolf. As our resources have been spent chasing the big bad wolf who wasn’t, our little Dutch boy President has little left with which to fix our dikes of infrastructure and support as they continue to spring new leaks. What will happen if the dikes break? At least the little Dutch boy will be saved.

Curt Day can be reached at cday@prodigy.net