What Is He Thinking?
Is the Bush budget all about slashing Social Security and Medicare? Yes, says Kent Conrad and ‘it is nuts, stone-cold nuts’

Sticker shock. That’s the reaction on Capitol Hill to President George W. Bush’s budget. The deficit numbers are staggering, even to Bush loyalists: $307 billion next year, more than a trillion dollars in five years. And that’s not counting the looming war with Iraq and the cost of a prolonged occupation. Bush talks plenty about war, but he doesn’t tell the country how he plans to pay for it. (...)

“It is nuts, stone-cold nuts,” Conrad said in an interview with NEWSWEEK. “And they’re not nuts, and they’re not stupid. They’re smart people, and they know what we know, that the deficit will explode when federal expenditures peak. And that’s when I had this revelation: the only rationale for what they’re doing is that they plan to fundamentally gut Social Security and Medicare.”
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  thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!

The war on the poor
Bush's compassionate conservatism borders on loan-sharking

This not a liberal fantasy. Conservatives acknowledge that Bush's long-term goal is to reduce the federal government's capacity to act -- yes, to spend -- without saying so publicly. The large tax cuts the president has put on the table, conservative columnist Donald Lambro wrote candidly this week, “are, in effect, Mr. Bush's stealth initiative to curb future spending -- big time.” Exactly. And if you look carefully, most of the spending cuts will be in programs for the poor and near-poor.

Stealthy redistribution upward is the theme of Bush's domestic program. Under the cover of promoting growth, Bush is shifting more and more of the tax burden away from the wealthy. That's the effect of his elimination of the dividends tax and the huge new tax loopholes being sold as “savings” incentives.
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Is the Maestro a Hack?

If Mr. Greenspan nonetheless finds ways to rationalize Mr. Bush's irresponsibility, or if he takes refuge in Delphic utterances that could mean anything or nothing, history will remember him as a man who urged hard choices on others, but refused to make hard choices himself.

This may be Alan Greenspan's last chance to save his reputation — and the country's solvency.
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