TEXT B If there was one thing
Americans had a right to expect from Congress, it was a federal plan to help the
elderly pay for prescription drugs. It is a promise that has been made again and
again—in particularly high decibels during the last presidential election. The
House and Senate have passed bills, and although both are flawed, this page has
urged Congress to finish work on them as a first step toward fulfilling this
longstanding commitment. Unfortunately, things have changed. The
government cannot afford the program now. That is the fault of President Bush
and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. They broke the bank with
their enormous tax cuts. The country is facing the largest budget deficit in
history, and there is no realistic plan for getting it under control. The
limited version of a prescription drug benefit now being considered in Congress
would cost about $400 billion over 10 years. Older Americans
had a right to expect that help, but they do not have a right to demand it, not
when it would be financed by borrowing, with the bills to be paid by their
grandchildren. Mr. Bush, a specialist in pain avoidance, told
people that they could have the programs they wanted— prescription drugs for the
elderly, better schools for children—along with modest tax cuts for the middle
class and whoppers for the wealthy. When 9/11 occurred, the president simply
added the war on terror, and then the war on Saddam Hussein, to the list. For
all his talk about fiscal conservatism, Mr. Bush has never vetoed a spending
bill, even the obscene $180 billion farm subsidy program. To pay for it all, he
simply increased the deficit. Deficits in and of themselves are
not necessarily a problem, but the current one is frightening for two reasons.
One is its size: projected at well above $500 billion for next year, and
approaching 5 percent of the gross domestic product. The other is its
permanence. Cutting taxes temporarily to fight the recession made sense, but the
Bush tax cuts are meant to be permanent—even though Congress gave most of them a
phony 11-year expiration date in an attempt to mask their effect.
Dropping the proposal is, of course, just what a large chunk of the
Republican Party was hoping for all along. For those Republicans, deficits are a
useful tool to beat back popular entitlement programs—a "starve the beast"
strategy, in the words of Ronald Reagan’ s budget director. Democrats in
Congress, meanwhile, rail against the deficit, but they are still pushing for
the prescription drug plan. Like the tax-cutters, they are simply building up to
some sort of financial Armageddon like soaring interest rates or a collapsing
dollar— and hoping that blame will fall on the other party. Our
answer is different. The people have to decide whether they want tax cuts or
programs like the prescription drug plan. It’s tree that the tax-cut radicals
will win this round. But then we will have an election. How much will the prescription drug benefit cost per year