Monday, October 08, 2007

More on Bush and the National Budget

Bush, having declined to veto a single spending measure when Republicans controlled Congress, says he wants to veto just about all of them now. It is perhaps too near the twilight of his presidency to call Bush on this latest hypocrisy-and anyway, the repetition is tiresome. Better to illuminate the picayune nature of the fight Bush picks.

The dispute is over a total-spread among all the spending bills-of $22 billion that Bush himself did not call for. That amounts to about 2 percent of federal spending that is subject to annual appropriations by Congress. How else to put it in perspective?

Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing nearly $10 billion every month. The president's point isn't to force negotiations over a piddling sum. It's to fake out the public so that it believes Democrats can't perform basic governmental tasks.



Via J-Walk Blog

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