How do we pay for the recovery?

By cutting "unnecessary" spending of course.

"One day after pledging to undertake one of history's largest reconstruction efforts, President Bush served notice yesterday that rebuilding the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast will require spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. Amid growing concern among congressional Republicans about the huge cost of the planned reconstruction effort, Bush said the federal government can foot the bill without resorting to a tax increase. 'You bet it's going to cost money. But I'm confident we can handle it,' Bush said. 'It's going to mean that we're going to have to cut unnecessary spending.'''

Estimates for the ultimate cost of this reconstruction plan are $200 billion. But even the worst natural disaster to strike America in nearly a century can't threaten Bush's tax cuts. Nor does it put a damper on Bush's "plans" to reduce the deficit.

"Bush pledged to find some spending cuts. But he offered no specifics, and his chief economic aide, Allan B. Hubbard, dismissed the rebuilding effort's impact on the longer-term effort to reduce the budget deficit. 'This in no way will adversely impact his commitment to cut the deficit in half by 2009,' he said."

I can think of a few ways it will.

Bush may not have offered some specifics, but cuts in the budget he's already offered to Congress for 2006 show some cuts that appear to go against his own recovery plans:

"Also, some of those cuts would hit precisely the programs the lawmakers want to expand. Among the programs slated by Bush for cuts were Medicaid, which he now wants to extend to evacuees, and the Army Corps of Engineers, which is faced with the huge burden of repairing levees and dredging waterways wrecked in the storm."

As with Iraq, the President wants to have his cake and eat it too. Despite the unprecedented cost of the recovery effort, not to mention the unending cost of the Iraq war, the Bush administration will admit no threat to efforts to cut the deficit, nor will they allow any threat to extending more tax cuts and making permanent the ones already extended. Reality is, quite simply, not an option.

A refusal to raise taxes, or even roll back future tax cuts, is premised on the notion that tax cuts are necessary to economic recovery. That they don't seem to be working for the average fellow like you and me, doesn't defeat that notion. But even if you believe that tax cuts fuel economic growth(a premise that may be applicable in some circumstances) there comes a point at which money is needed for short-term expenses, that no amount of tax cutting for long-term recovery, is going to make up for. Think of a guy who saves his money by refusing to pay his credit card bills, and you get the idea.

In other words, there's simply no way to pay for everything. There's no way to pay for tax cuts, pay for the war in Iraq, and pay for the cost of the reconstruction effort in the Gulf Coast. It...is...impossible. And no amount of "offsets" from the budget will do the trick either, even if you're so foolish as to cut long-term funding for programs that directly benefit people who managed to survive Katrina.

The talk now is of Bush trying to "recover" his presidency as well. But his legacy is already all too apparent.