🚀 go-pugleaf

3 million American jobs lost since Bush became president.

41 million working Americans have no health insurance.

Millions of American senior citizens have to choose between food and
prescription drugs.

And Bush is blowing your tax money on Iraq, 

such as

 $5.7 BILLION to upgrade Iraq's electricity system
 $875 million to restore Iraq's marshlands
 $856 million to upgrade Iraqi airports

 $35 million "for the protection of Afghan President"

 $164 million to develop a training curriculum for the Iraqi army   
 $54 million for a computer study for the Iraqi postal service

 $100 million to build seven Iraqi planned communities with clinics
and mosques
 $900 million to IMPORT petroleum products into Iraq
 $20 million for a 4-week business course, at $10,000 per pupil

and 

 $878 million on health care for IRAQIS

See details below...

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Washington Post
September 23, 2003

For Bush's Iraq Request, Tough Comparisons Loom 

By Jonathan Weisman and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers


With lights recently blacked out in the mid-Atlantic and wetlands
conservation being squeezed, President Bush wants to spend nearly $5.7
billion on Iraq's electricity system and as much as $100 million next
year to restore that nation's drained marshlands.

Such comparisons are dogging the administration as it formally
launches its defense of an $87 billion emergency war spending request,
which Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) yesterday labeled "fiscal shock
and awe." And they are creating a growing sense of unease among
Republicans, who say the president's war spending will no doubt be
used against them in next year's elections.

"I have no doubt that some people will be angry," said Rep. James C.
Greenwood (R-Pa.), "and I have no doubt some people will try to take
full political advantage."

L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the Iraqi coalition provisional
authority, appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee
yesterday in the first of seven hearings scheduled on the president's
request, comparing the emergency spending bill to the Marshall Plan
that followed World War II. The $20.3 billion for Iraqi
reconstruction, he said, "bespeak grandeur of vision equal to the one
which created the free world."

"Creating a sovereign, democratic, constitutional and prosperous Iraq
deals a blow to terrorists," he said. "It gives the lie to those who
describe us as the enemies of Islam, enemies of the Arabs or enemies
of the poor. That is why the president's $87 billion request has to be
seen as an important element in the global war on terrorism."

But lawmakers from both parties seem anxious. Sen. Sam Brownback
(R-Kan.) told Bremer he is getting "pointed questions" from his
constituents, who are demanding to know why a country with the world's
second-largest oil reserves is not paying for its own reconstruction.

A study to be released today by the House Budget Committee's
Democratic staff concluded that the cost of the Iraq war and
occupation could easily reach $417 billion over the next decade, more
than the president is seeking for a 10-year prescription drug benefit
for Medicare. Even a benign postwar scenario would cost taxpayers $308
billion, the Democrats concluded.

"We need at a minimum to recognize the real costs of our operations in
Iraq," said John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), the Budget Committee's ranking
Democrat.

The debate has touched the presidential contest, as well. Democratic
candidate Howard Dean recently noted that his health care plan would
cost about $87 billion, "which happens to be almost exactly the amount
the president . . . asked to wage war in Iraq for another year." Given
a choice, he said, Americans would choose "health insurance that
nobody can take away."

Recent events, natural and political, have conspired to underscore
opponents' political charges that Bush is spending more on Iraqis than
on his own citizens. The president is seeking $5.7 billion to rebuild
and expand Iraq's electricity generation, transmission and
distribution systems, just as millions of Americans are regaining
power lost to Hurricane Isabel and Congress is grappling with the
causes of August's blackout in the Northeast. 

"Where are we going to find the money to repair our own blackout-prone
electricity grid if tax dollars are to be spent overseas at such a
profligate pace?" asked Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).

Bush wants $856 million to upgrade three Iraqi airports, a seaport,
rail lines and communications systems. Another $470 million would go
toward repairing roads, bridges and houses in Iraq and rehabilitating
Iraqi government buildings. The administration also wants $105 million
for Afghanistan, to rebuild a highway between Kandahar and Herat and
start laying more than 600 miles of smaller roads.

Yet on the home front, the administration and Congress are at
loggerheads over a massive new bill to finance transportation
projects. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
envisions spending $375 billion over the next six years, while the
White House wants $241 billion.

"Most Americans want us to leave Afghanistan and Iraq with a success
on our hands rather than with our tail between our legs, but I think
it would help a great deal in doing that for the administration to
take another look at what we're doing here in the United States," said
Thomas E. Petri (R-Wis.), chairman of the committee's highways,
transit and pipelines subcommittee. 

And as Republicans battle among themselves over the cost of seniors'
prescription drugs, the White House hopes to spend $878 million on
health care in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Look at the needs we have here at home with our own roads, sewers and
water projects," said Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio). "It's hard to
tell people there isn't money for sewers and water and then send that
kind of money to Iraq."

The fine print of the president's request details how deeply the
United States is delving into the workings of Iraqi and Afghan
society. One section would provide $35 million in part "for the
protection of Afghan President [Hamid] Karzai." Another $37 million
would help the Afghan government pay its civil servants.

Democrats and Republicans in Washington may be bickering over domestic
education funding, but they are likely to approve $40 million to
construct 275 schools and train 10,000 additional teachers in
Afghanistan. Another $45 million would build 100 Afghan markets and
create a land registry.

In Iraq, $875 million is earmarked, in part, to restore drained
marshlands, while at home, the administration has proposed holding
wetland conservation programs in the Interior Department and Army
Corps of Engineers to 2002 levels, just over $100 million.

Independent experts say the spending measure's price tag should not be
a surprise. On a per capita basis, it corresponds roughly to the
amount the international community spent on Bosnia in the 1990s.

This time, however, the United States is paying almost the entire
bill; in Bosnia, it paid for 22 percent of the reconstruction costs.
James F. Dobbins, director of Rand's International Security and
Defense Policy Center, said lawmakers could have anticipated this
commitment when they chose to oust Saddam Hussein without enlisting
more allies abroad.

"The Congress . . . by an overwhelming majority voted in favor of this
conflict," Dobbins said. "Iraq's 10 times bigger than Bosnia. All
Congress had to do is multiply Bosnia by 10. It's not rocket science."

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Washington Post
September 26, 2003

In GOP, Concern Over Iraq Price Tag 
Some Doubt Need For $20.3 Billion For Rebuilding 

By Jonathan Weisman and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers


A new curriculum for training an Iraqi army for $164 million. Five
hundred experts, at $200,000 each, to investigate crimes against
humanity. A witness protection program for $200,000 per Iraqi
participant. A computer study for the Iraqi postal service: $54
million.

Such numbers, buried in President Bush's $20.3 billion request for
Iraq's reconstruction, have made some congressional Republicans
nervous, even furious. Although the GOP leadership has tried to unite
publicly around its president, cracks are beginning to show.

"President Bush should live up to his recent pledges to restrain
spending, by . . . taking a strong stance that the new Iraq can and
should pay for its own reconstruction," wrote Rep. Tom Feeney (Fla.),
a freshman Republican, and Stephen Moore, a conservative economist, in
an editorial for the National Review. 

The discontent is relatively contained so far, said Jim Dyer,
Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, but
that is because few lawmakers have read the proposal's fine print. As
more details seep out, he said, anger is sure to rise.

Those details include $100 million to build seven planned communities
with a total of 3,258 houses, plus roads, an elementary school, two
high schools, a clinic, a place of worship and a market for each; $10
million to finance 100 prison-building experts for six months, at
$100,000 an expert; 40 garbage trucks at $50,000 each; $900 million to
import petroleum products such as kerosene and diesel to a country
with the world's second-largest oil reserves; and $20 million for a
four-week business course, at $10,000 per pupil.

"If those are what the costs are, I'm glad Congress is asking
questions," said Brian Reidl, a budget analyst at the conservative
Heritage Foundation. "If the White House wants to be portrayed as
spending tax dollars in Iraq as cost-effectively as they spend [money]
anywhere else, they're going to have to explain this."

Already, the administration's request for $400 million to build two
4,000-bed prisons at $50,000 a bed has raised enough questions in
Congress to force Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer
to explain that cement must be imported to make concerete.

"We're not talking sanity here," Dyer said. "The world's
second-largest oil country is importing oil, and a country full of
concrete is importing concrete."

Republicans have grown nervous enough about Iraq that Vice President
Cheney and White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten traveled to
Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet privately with the agitated ranks
and go over the $87 billion emergency war spending request.

"What [lawmakers] really wanted them to do was carefully review it so
they can justify to constituents why they voted for it," said a GOP
aide who was at the meeting. "You've got to be able to go back home
and explain why we need to do all this."

In several closed meetings this week, Republicans questioned why the
administration is piling more spending atop an ever-expanding federal
deficit. Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), a member of the House
Appropriations Committee, plans to offer an amendment making the
package a loan, which the White House adamantly opposes.

"The people of eastern Tennessee want to know why the $20.3 billion
couldn't be repaid by the Iraqi people from the oil revenues," Wamp
said.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) insisted that the administration press
nations such as France, Russia and Germany to forgive some of Iraq's
$200 billion foreign debt, which Bremer conceded is now the United
States's responsibility. "It's tough to make a case to give $20
billion outright," Flake said. "There are a lot of us who are still
troubled."

Flake and other conservatives also want the administration to offset
the reconstruction package with cuts in other areas. 

Meanwhile at a House hearing yesterday, Democrats pressed Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz about whether the administration
plans to withdraw troops right before the 2004 presidential election.
He said no decisions were being made on political grounds.

"These are national security decisions; they have to be made on that
basis," he said. Wolfowitz said that doesn't mean that "we're not
trying to, in fact, get more Iraqis on the front lines, get them dying
for their country so fewer Americans have to."

It's the reconstruction spending, however, that is drawing some
conservatives' ire. Moore, who heads the political action committee
Club for Growth, called some of the aid request "frivolous" and much
of it "preposterous." Pete Sepp, a spokesman for the conservative
National Taxpayers Union, said Americans are being misled.

"Many members of the general public are being led to believe this
money is just to turn the lights back on in Iraq," Sepp said. "Once
word gets out about the nature of some of these projects, it will pose
a real dilemma for a number of policymakers who believe U.S. foreign
aid is already suffering from administrative problems as well as
overambitious goals. These are the kinds of things that radio talk
show hosts love to chew up and give to their listeners."

GOP pollster Robert Teeter hinted that congressional Republicans are
right to be nervous -- not so much about the military campaign in
Iraq, or even the rising U.S. casualties, but about the White House's
spending request. Support for the war remains relatively high, he
said, and if elected Republicans can frame the full $87 billion
package as the amount it takes to support the troops, they will be
fine.

But as soon as the discussion turns to the nuts and bolts of Iraq's
reconstruction, the public's longstanding antipathy to foreign aid
quickly surfaces, Teeter said.

Then, he said, the overwhelming sentiment is, "We need to take care of
our own." It is up to Republicans to keep the conversation centered on
the troops, while Democrats will try to focus on the reconstruction's
spending details.

Some Democrats want to split the $87 billion bill into a $67 billion
military spending measure for quick passage and a separate
reconstruction measure. Republican leaders adamantly oppose this,
saying the entire proposal is essential and cannot be picked apart. 

"The package is a wartime supplemental [spending bill], directly tied
to the security and the ultimate withdrawal of United States forces
from the region," said White House budget office spokesman Trent
Duffy. "It has to be viewed in that context."

Duffy dismissed as "preposterous" Democrats' assertions that the
administration is willing to spend more on Iraqis than its own
citizens. The federal government spends $5.9 billion on prisons each
year, compared with the $510 million the administration wants for
corrections in Iraq next year, he said. Domestic air and ground
transportation consumes $64 billion, dwarfing the $753 million the
White House wants for Iraq. 

For conservatives pushing for less spending in the United States, such
comparisons hold little value. It is not the dollar totals but the
targets. "A $54 million study for their post office?" asked Dan
Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation.

Some Republican aides say the numbers may be more defensible than they
sound because the budget is not quite real. They suggest the
administration has inflated costs, in part to avoid having to come
back next year for a new emergency spending bill, and in part so they
can skim some of the money for classified military efforts.

And many congressional Republicans quietly say they will never
challenge the president's request in public. To do so, they say, would
risk an intraparty rift that could endanger Bush's reelection efforts
as well as their own.

Democrats, meanwhile, question how long the GOP can remain unified.
"Republicans are losing confidence the president can commit these
resources in a reasonable way," Senate Minority Leader Thomas A.
Daschle (D-S.D.) said.

Senate GOP leaders are rushing to bring the $87 billion request to a
vote by the end of next week, prompting Democratic complaints that the
measure is not being fully considered. Daschle questioned the need for
haste, noting that Bremer told Democrats this week that the money will
not be needed until January.

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