The Bush administration unveiled their budget blueprint this week and like most of their other policy initiatives, it's incomplete. The budget shows little connection with any form of reality and the Washington Post suggests that it would require "heroic assumptions" to be plausible. From the
Post:
The president's budget acknowledges the cost of Bush's call to make his tax cuts permanent -- $1.35 trillion over the next decade and nearly $120 billion in 2011 alone. But beyond 2007, the budget assumes no military expenditures in Iraq or Afghanistan and no effort to address the unintended effects of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax system that was designed to hit the rich but has instead increasingly pinched the middle class. It also assumes Congress will cut domestic spending every year after 2007.
Those factors led Goldman Sachs economists to tell clients yesterday that the deficit forecasts are "unrealistic."
"Unrealistic" has been a common theme of the Bush administration, and I have actually thought for a while that this is do to the fact that this is the laziest administration ever to govern America. We've all heard Bush say that his job is "hard work." Yes, it is, but this administration doesn't put in that hard work.
Let's take a look at some of this administrations greatest failures and how laziness contributed to them.
9/11: While anti-terrorism experts had their "hair on fire" warning of an imminent attack on America, the Bush team's response was to go on vacation. Richard Clarke's warning were repeatedly ignored, he couldn't get any meaningful meetings with the top brass in the administration. The result: Terrorists brought down the World Trade Centers and hit the Pentagon.
WMD: You can say that information was stove piped or that we were lied to, and to an extent, both of those statements are true, but the reality also is that once the administration had some evidence that Iraq might be in possession of WMD. The work stopped there. No further evidence was reviewed. The result: We launched an unnecessary war in Iraq.
Post war planning: Once the initial attack plan was conceived, Donald Rumsfeld ended any further planning. He "guessed" that we would be greeted at liberators and flowers would be thrown at our soldiers. The result: We're stuck in a quagmire in the desert.
Domestic spying: Look all you have to do is file a brief with the FISA court and everything is legal. It's that simple. Yesterday, during Senate hearings, Alberto Gonzales complained that he would have to do a lot of work if the administration was to follow the law and obtain warrants from the FISA court. Well, he does collect a paycheck from the US government to do such things. I'm sorry if it cuts into his minesweeper time, and given his past work record where he cut and pasted opinions about death row appeals while Texas AG, it probably wouldn't have cut much.. The result: The Bush administration decided to break the law rather than do the work.
Those are just a few examples, but let's return to the budget. This is just something sloppily thrown together just to move the process out of their hands. They'll let Congress worry about it, and if they don't like the results, eh, they'll live with it. Vetoes are hard work. To be honest, I doubt they even know how to fill out the paper work for a veto.
If a grade was being given to this administration, a lot of people on my side of the political spectrum would give it an F, but I don't think that's quite right. An F implies that the student tried and failed. I think I would give this administration an I for incomplete. They just haven't attempted the coursework.
