Billions and billions dig a deeper hole

If President Bush's budget for fiscal 2009 is approved in its current form, U.S. government spending will have increased by more than $1.2 trillion since President Clinton left office; adjusted for inflation, that's a 35% increase. Bush has increased spending at three times the rate Clinton did when he was president, and also has given us the biggest defense budget since World War II -- and that's regularly budgeted defense spending, not counting funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet, as in the past, Bush is proud of his fiscal discipline and projects the end of the deficit in 2012. That sounds great, but it's misleading. This budget -- like all of Bush's budgets -- is packed with gimmicks that hide the cost of the administration's insatiable appetite. Bush's $3.1-trillion request for 2009 would raise spending by 6% over last year and 67% over 2001. The surge in overall spending indicates no serious trade-offs are being made. The administration argues, for example, that much of the spending goes to protect America from its enemies. But shouldn't the administration also use those threats to justify long-overdue cutting of waste in the Pentagon?

Instead, the defense budget continues to explode, thanks to the use of emergency supplemental spending packages, which do not get counted toward the overall deficit until years later. To give a sense of how that works, when Bush made his fiscal year 2008 budget request, he told us the deficit was going to be $239 billion. A year later, as we factor in supplemental requests, we find the 2008 deficit is $410 billion, and it will get larger as additional supplementals come in.

In fiscal 2009, which begins in October, the budget gap is seen at $407 billion; after "emergency" spending is included, it will be a lot higher. Bush's deficits represent a significant short-term deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook. Republicans argue that these deficits remain small relative to the gross domestic product, but the national debt, which has ballooned since 2000, will amount to a whopping 36.7% of GDP in 2009.

The final deficit number for 2009 will almost certainly be much higher than it looks now. The bill for what is now a $145-billion economic stimulus package, for example, will grow as special interests demand perks. That process has already started: The 39 million members of AARP are sending daily e-mails to congressional offices demanding that Social Security recipients be in line for the proposed $600-a-person payments in the bill that House leaders negotiated with the White House. This largesse would cost us $23 billion.