Bush’s Blank Check

by Stephen Slivinski

Stephen Slivinski is director of budget studies at the Cato Institute.

Sounding like Yogi Berra, President Bush gave the best description of his administration’s overall fiscal philosophy last week. When asked on September 16 how much his grand program to rebuild the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina will cost, he answered, “It’s going to cost whatever it’s going to cost.”

And, boy, will it ever. The current estimate of the amount of taxpayer money needed to pay for Bush’s grand scheme range from $150 billion to $200 billion. And that’s on top of a $612 billion increase in the overall federal budget since he took office in 2001. Adding the $62 billion already appropriated for Katrina relief puts him in the same big-spending league as Lyndon Johnson.