From the NY Times:
Level With Americans
By BOB HERBERT

It's not too late for President Bush to go on television and level with the American people about what the war in Iraq is costing the nation in human treasure and cold hard cash. Like members of a family, the citizens of a nation beset by tragedy have a need and a right to know the truth about its dimensions and implications.

Last week the Army had to make the embarrassing disclosure that it did not have enough troops available to replenish the forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. So in addition to extending the deployment of many of the troops already in the war zones, the Army announced that it would prevent soldiers from leaving the service — even if their voluntary enlistments were up — if their units were scheduled to go to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Thousands of soldiers will be affected by these "stop-loss orders," which is the term the Army uses. Others have said that delaying retirements and blocking the departure of soldiers who have completed their enlistments will amount to a backdoor draft.

In any event, the Army is so over-extended, stretched so dangerously thin, that most knowledgeable observers, whatever their take on the war in Iraq, have described the stop-loss policy as inevitable.

"They don't have enough soldiers," said Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island who is a member of the Armed Services Committee. "And when you don't have enough soldiers, you have to keep the ones you have longer. And that's exactly what they did."

The shortage of soldiers was widely recognized by insiders, but the administration never made the problem clear to the public, and never took the steps necessary to deal with it. Senator Reed, a former Army captain, told me in an interview last week that he felt the civilian leadership at the Pentagon "should have recognized very early on that we needed a bigger army and should have moved aggressively" to expand the force.

"Last fall," he said, "I sponsored an amendment along with Senator Schumer on the supplemental appropriations bill to increase the Army by 10,000, just as sort of an opening salvo. And they vociferously opposed it. They lobbied against it and they killed it."

The stop-loss policy is the latest illustration of both the danger and the fundamental unfairness embedded in the president's "what, me worry?" approach to the war in Iraq. Almost the entire burden of the war has been loaded onto the backs of a brave but tiny segment of the population — the men and women, most of them from working-class families, who enlisted in the armed forces for a variety of reasons, from patriotism to a desire to further their education to the need for a job.

They never expected that the failure of their country to pay for an army of sufficient size would result in their being trapped in a war zone with the exit doors locked when their enlistments were up.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have been given a pass. The president has not asked us to share in the sacrifice and we haven't demanded the opportunity to do so. We're not even paying for the war. It's being put on credit cards issued in the names of future generations.

For America's privileged classes, this is the most comfortable war imaginable. There's something utterly surreal about a government cutting taxes and bragging about an economic boom while at the same time refusing to provide the forces necessary to relieve troops who are fighting and dying overseas.

We should stop the madness. A president who is sending troops into the crucible of combat has an obligation to support them fully and treat them fairly.

How many troops, really, are needed in Iraq? And for how long? Five years? Ten years? (Many thoughtful people who initially opposed the war but believe now that it would be wrong to just abandon Iraq think the U.S. will have to keep troops there for a minimum of five years.)

There seems to be widespread agreement now that tens of thousands of additional men and women are needed in the Army. If that's so, how much would such an expansion cost? And who would be called upon to serve?

Mr. Bush has always been quick to characterize himself as a wartime president. But he's never been candid about the true costs of war, about the terrible suffering and extreme sacrifices that wars always demand.

Now is the perfect time to correct that failing. The nation deserves the truth.

From the NY Times:
Fiscal Shenanigans

President Bush appears to be planning to run for re-election as a tax cutter without discussing what federal programs will be sacrificed to make up for the lost revenue. That can't be allowed to happen. Voters have the right to see the whole picture, including the downside. Chances are they won't like the view.

While Mr. Bush has been out crowing about spending increases in some popular programs, his Office of Management and Budget was instructing federal departments to prepare to pare them down. In a May 19 memo that was first reported in The Washington Post, departments were told to trim domestic discretionary spending in 2006, the first complete fiscal year after the November election. And the administration recently submitted legislation to impose caps that would result in further reductions in every year after that through 2009.

According to estimates by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Office of Management and Budget guidelines translate into inflation-adjusted reductions in 2006 alone of about $925 million for Head Start and childhood education. That would come at a time when schools are already struggling to meet the demands of Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative without adequate resources. College financial aid, mainly Pell Grants, would take a $550 million hit — at a time when lower-income students are dropping out of school because they cannot meet rapidly rising costs.

The same projections show that veterans' medical care would be cut by $1.5 billion (after a planned $380 million cut in 2005). All told, under the proposed cuts, total funds for these and other affected programs — like environmental protection, housing programs and nutrition aid for poor pregnant women and children — would be $21 billion less in 2006 than today. By 2009, domestic discretionary spending, not counting homeland security, would be $45 billion below its current level and would be a smaller portion of the economy than it has been at any time since 1963.

The budget-cutting exercise is undoubtedly inspired, at least in part, by complaints from conservatives about the enormous deficits being created by the White House's fiscal recklessness. They like the tax cuts, but want to match them with spending reductions. They have been demanding that the president start paring the budget, or at least demonstrate that he will be ready to do so after November.

It's hard to imagine any realistic approach that would have the nation achieve fiscal responsibility with the tax cuts in place. First of all, even all of the proposed cuts in the memo would barely begin to make a dent in the annual deficits, which are likely to range from $300 billion to $400 billion for the rest of the decade. Second, although the fate of specific programs has not been decided, there is no way the administration can take a multibillion-dollar whack out of the relatively small budget for domestic discretionary programs — a mere one-sixth of federal spending — without hurting services that are both popular and desperately needed.

Some of the staunchest tax-cut supporters in Congress are perfectly aware that the math doesn't work. They hope the accumulating pressure of the deficits will eventually force the federal government to go further and cut entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Very few of them, however, are prepared to run for re-election on that plan.

Currently, tax cuts since 2001 account for 17 times as much of the swing from surplus to deficit as do increases in domestic discretionary spending. No one who refuses to face up to the root cause of our fiscal problems should be permitted to seek public office without saying where the money will come from. Candidates who insist on keeping the Bush tax cuts — whether they're running for Congress or the presidency itself — have to show us the math.