Amen

Wanted: Adult in

the White House

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER,
Times Perspective Columnist
Published July 17, 2005 Link

I'm not a big worrier by temperament. The recent terror attacks in London would not put me off public transit. I had no qualms about boarding an airplane after 9/11. In my various jobs, I've received personal death threats that I've shrugged off.

But now I'm worried.

I'm worried about our staggering deficit (which the White House is celebrating because it looks like this year we'll come up only $333-billion short - whoopee), a record-breaking trade imbalance and an economy that runs on cheap oil as the world's production is about to peak.

But mostly I'm worried because our leaders are not. Every day that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Congress whistle Dixie while fiscal disaster looms only advances the day of reckoning and demonstrates they are not fit to lead.

The idea of pay-as-you-go budgeting was utilized while Bill Clinton was president as a responsible way to bring spending in line with revenue. It was abandoned by Bush, because that would require adult choices.

I don't agree with Bush's approach of starving the Treasury in order to give tax breaks to millionaires. But if that is truly your priority as president, then cut spending to pay for it. Of course, reducing the Pentagon's slice isn't really an option when Bush's war in Iraq is costing about $4.8-billion a month. So, the president has to look for other savings. He could close the national parks, end Medicaid, shutter the space program - whatever federal expenditures the president views as less important than the tax cuts he seeks to make permanent.

A responsible leader would make a case for hard trade-offs. But Bush has chosen instead to ignore reality. His notion of shared sacrifice in wartime means sending the kids of the country's working class off to battle and using Asian banks as a no-limit credit card to pay the bills.

This is not leadership, it's bleedership,

as in bleeding the country dry.

When Bush came to office our national debt stood at $5.7-trillion and there was a budget surplus. Now the debt is nearing $8-trillion and growing daily.

But the spiraling debt is a mosquito bite compared with the problem of meeting our energy needs into the future. Sixty dollars a barrel is just the beginning. Past oil price spikes were due to disrupted supply, such as the oil embargo of 1973 or Iran's revolution of 1979. This time, demand is outpacing supply.

It is no use blaming China and India for horning in on a world oil supply that had been our playground. The real culprit is our own attachment to gas-guzzling cars. Every day, American cars consume 11 percent of the daily output of oil around the world - up 35 percent since 1973, the year Americans were put on notice that oil was finite.

Facing us too, like the barrel of a gun, is the fact that many experts believe we will soon reach "peak oil," the point at which oil production will be at its capacity and begin to decline.

Leaders from both parties have been asleep at the switch for 30 years. During those precious decades we should have been preparing for the end of oil. But what we got instead was a national energy policy that consisted almost entirely of tax breaks for oil companies and a determined cozying-up with the Saudis.

Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress are no better. Their silver bullet is drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a terrible idea from an environmental standpoint, and one that would provide only a tiny percentage of our energy needs.

What we need are adult leaders willing to deliver some bad news along with realistic solutions. I'd accept ANWR drilling if the administration would also slap a whopping tax on gas (thereby encouraging conservation), and use those funds, first for research into alternative energy, and second for making public transportation cheap, convenient and comfortable.

Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in the energy sector and author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, says it is essential that we invent our way out of this problem by investing in research and development as if our lives depended on it (because they do). In the meantime, Simmons says, we need to take some serious steps to conserve, including taking all the trucks off the highway and putting their cargo on train-beds and boats. That would not only improve energy efficiency three- to tenfold, he says, it would relieve highway congestion, increasing gas mileage for cars.

Sounds good to me.

Honestly, I care far less about what Karl Rove said to whom than about what Bush is not saying or doing about the real challenges facing the nation. I want a president who prepares for the future, not one who mortgages it. We need an adult to occupy the White House again. And sometime soon, before the house is sold on the courthouse steps by the Asian banks that own it.