A Fighting Strategy For Veterans

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: A Fighting Strategy for Veterans

The New York Times

March 5, 2005
EDITORIAL

A Fighting Strategy for Veterans

Military veterans are crying foul over President Bush's budget proposals to
cut spending on their health care. The budget must not be balanced "on the
backs
of veterans," wrote Stephen P. Condon, the chairman of the Air Force
Association, in a recent letter to The Times, a point that was echoed by
other veterans
at Congressional hearings last month. We agree with the veterans - but for
somewhat different reasons than they have put forth.

The veterans' goal is to block the president's attempt to impose new
hospital fees, higher prescription co-payments and other spending
constraints - all
of which would add up to an estimated 16 percent reduction in veterans'
benefits in 2010. (The estimate is from the nonprofit Center on Budget and
Policy
Priorities because the administration, breaking with 16 years of budget
tradition, did not provide five-year projections for specific programs.) But
if
veterans succeed in preserving only their own benefits, they will have been
outfoxed by the administration.

Mr. Bush knows that wartime is no time to go after veterans' benefits. But
by proposing changes that are politically implausible while challenging
Congress
to cut spending, the administration gains a bargaining chip: if lawmakers
aren't willing to make the veterans' cuts the president has proposed, they
will
be pressured to make even deeper cuts in programs for people who don't have
the veterans' ability to fight back.

In effect, Mr. Bush's budget pits veterans against the 660,000 women,
infants and children whose food assistance is on the chopping block; against
the 120,000
preschoolers who would be cut from Head Start; against the 370,000 families
and disabled and elderly individuals who would lose rental assistance;
against
the whole communities that would lose support for clean air and drinking
water; and so on.

The only way for veterans to avoid those unacceptable trade-offs is to
refuse to fight on the president's terms. The size and scope of Mr. Bush's
proposed
spending cuts are a direct result of his refusal to ask for tax-cut
rollbacks - that is, to ask wealthy investors, who have had lavish,
deficit-bloating
tax cuts over the past four years, to contribute toward deficit reduction.
On the contrary, Mr. Bush's budget proposes even more tax breaks,
specifically
for people with six-figure incomes or more and overflowing investment
portfolios.

Most galling, the new tax cuts would be, in themselves, so large that the
net spending cuts Mr. Bush has requested would not be enough to pay for
them,
let alone reduce the existing deficit.

Veterans have the moral and institutional clout to argue that no one group
should be singled out to make sacrifices until all groups are asked to
sacrifice.
Bolstering that case is the fact that all successful deficit-cutting budgets
have included tax increases on the affluent, including President Reagan's
1983 budget, the first President George Bush's 1991 budget and President
Bill Clinton's 1994 budget. Mr. Bush's 2006 budget must do the same. If
veterans
drive that point home, the benefits they'll save will be their own, and
those of many women and children, too.

Copyright 2005

Posted by Miriam V. 3/5