The war in Iraq might not be going quite as smoothly as the Bush administration hoped, but the war at home is going just swimmingly. War is silencing debate not just on the wisdom of Bush’s foreign policy but on a host of other issues that would normally be front-page news.
Here are some of the issues listed in this Robert Kuttner article:
- veterans benefits .
- education funding
- efforts to dismantle the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union.
- $93 billion in Medicaid cuts
- environmental cuts
And why are there all these cuts?
Though the war serves as a handy distraction, these budget assaults are not mainly the result of war. Mainly they go to pay for the cost of tax cuts. The final cost of the war, occupation and rebuilding may reach $200 billion. The cost of the two Bush tax cuts is over $3 trillion. (In a preliminary vote, the Senate voted yesterday to trim Bush’s latest tax cut by $350 billion, but this still would have to be reconciled with the House.)
This administration’s slogan might as well be, “Sacrifice is for suckers.”
