The Bush Budget: Not Making Nice

We hope Ed Koch is happy with his fat senile self. "Make nice," Mr. New York implored us last August as the Republican invasion loomed. Don't protest, he urged, along with the mayor and the rest of the RNC booster crowd-instead, volunteer to help! Show some city spirit! Welcome GOP conventioneers with open arms-they're good for business! If we make nice enough, the president might throw us a few more Homeland Security crumbs! Then maybe we can shift some money around and buy a few band-aids for our crumbling schools! Why, between the Snapple contract and an NYC-loving second Bush administration, we'll be absolutely swimming in it!

Swimming in the Bush administration's excrement, anyway. The 2006 federal budget proposed by the president last week shouldn't have surprised anyone. It definitely did not surprise the many tens of thousands of New Yorkers who defied Koch & Co. in erecting a gigantic middle finger toward Madison Square Garden last summer.

There has been depressingly little outrage over, or even coverage of, the budget in the city press. Ian Urbina of the Times offered one of the few blunt assessments of the budget's local impact to appear last week. Urbina details how cuts and changes in the way federal block grants for social services are disbursed will result in steep cutbacks for day care centers, elderly services, public housing maintenance and youth and immigrant literacy programs. To pick just one concrete example cited by Urbina, the budget would eliminate federal funds for the tutoring of 10,000 poor NYC kids. In Charles Schumer's words, the budget is "brutal," indeed.

Money saved by slashing health and human services grants would not benefit the city in other ways. (Unless, that is, you consider tax cuts for Wall St. execs a benefit.) The formula for the disbursement of Homeland Security funds has finally been changed to better reflect comparative risk levels, but the kind of spending that actually helps protect the city-such as port security-has been cut by $500 million. The NYPD will also have to start coming up with the $81 million currently provided by Washington for the jailing of non-citizens. Some predict the city will receive even less of the Homeland Security pie than it does already, even as the DHS budget increases overall.

As for the biggest threat faced by this or any American city-but especially this one-the Bush budget flatlines funding for securing Russia's leaking nuclear arsenal and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons material and technology worldwide.

"The administration's new request for nonproliferation funding is disappointingly low," said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, an arms control organization. "After President Bush agreed during the 2004 campaign that the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists is the greatest threat to the United States, his budget fails his own test."

Meanwhile, both the Pentagon and NASA-forget Mars; the space agency is intricately bound up with missile defense-will get more money under the proposed budget. Which means more of New York City's money: The Mayor's office estimates that NYC pays out more than $13 billion more to Washington than it receives.

The bottom line is that education, housing and transportation infrastructure will continue to crumble under Washington's malign neglect, while we help fund programs that do nothing but line the pockets of defense contractors. The people responsible for this horrendous budget are the same ones Koch and Bloomie wanted us to make nice with this summer. We said it then, and we say it now: Fuck that, and fuck them.