By From The Chronicle

So, national budgets are always important. They tell you what the government plans to do with all the money you send them, so in a sense, this is the government telling you what you bought for yourself with that percentage of your pay check.

There are a couple of factors that make this budget particularly important. First, we currently face a record federal deficit which needs to be fixed at some point. Second, President Bush has promised that he is going to eliminate the deficit by 2009, and he absolutely cannot do that if this budget does not put him on track. Combine the first two factors, and you will conclude that this budget will remove the deficit from the abstract “credit card bill” mentality into the more immediate “yard sale” mentality. Third, this president is an ambitious conservative, which means that on the one hand he thinks government should be spending a lot less, but on the other hand he’s got some pretty major projects that will cost money. Because of this, the tree that this paper was made from will have been sacrificed so that you can be bombarded with a little more information about the budget proposal for 2006.

First, a broad overview. This budget does exaclty what needs to be done in order to resolve the deficit if we eliminate rolling back the president’s first term tax cuts from the list of possibilities. It contains massive cuts in spending from a wide range of projects so that we only end up spending about $2.57 trillion. Whether that will be enough of a cut in spending will be a huge subject of debate. Central, but not solitary to the liberal side of that debate will be the fact that neither the costs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor the costs for the president’s proposed social security overhaul are included in the budget.

The cuts are too numerous to list completely in a small editorial, but there are a few that will probably get a lot of attention. There were major cuts to the EPA funding, specifically most of a program that maintains and updates sewage and septic systems. There were cuts to certain community development programs with the intent of reconciling many community development programs under one much cheaper community development program. most puzzlingly, considering the president’s focus on defense spending in this budget is a cut from $499 million to $22 million for grants for local police departments to hire policemen.

The controversey over these cuts highlights the differences in fiscal philosophies between the two parties. The right is going to tell you that it cut the funding of programs that were not producing results, to which the left will reply that you cannot fix a failing program by cutting its funding.

But the actual underlying debate that is buried in the politics is over what the government should be responsible for providing. Fiscal conservatives believe the government should provide less services and let the citizens keep more of their money. Fiscal liberals believe the government should provide more services that are completely paid for by taxes because they think that big government is more responsible than big business when it comes to taking care of the people. This divide is not all that is involved in the debate over the tax and budget cuts, but it is the first issue you need to reconcile with yourself before you enter the debate.