The burgeoning Federal budget deficit should have been the focus of President Bush's economic conference last week. But inexplicably, it was not. Perhaps the President really does take the Bible as literally as his Christian Right base. After all, his cavalier approach to the deficit bears an eerie resemblance to an Evangelical giving away his possessions in anticipation of the Apocalypse. Maybe the party of 'Whip Inflation Now' and fiscal discipline has been hijacked by the Christian Right. It is hard to imagine the Grand Old Party ignoring a deficit this dangerous for something that looks this much like 'Born Again Economics.'

The first pillar of Born Again Economics: the Apocalypse is coming, so there is no point in saving for the future. Mission accomplished! When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected a $5 trillion reduction in federal debt over ten years. When Bush is sworn into his second term next month, the CBO will instead project a $2.3 trillion increase in the debt. Unless of course, the Bush tax cuts are made permanent. Then the figure will double.

This leads to the second pillar of Born Again Economics: the 'left behind' theory. In the widely successful and astronomically profitable 'Left Behind' series of Christian Right novels, all non-Christian believers are left behind to suffer or die on Earth after true believers ascend to Heaven. During the 2004 election, the GOP mobilized millions of Evangelicals who take these Biblical apocalyptic tales literally. And make no mistake; the GOP didn't pull that off by selling traditional Republican values like fiscal responsibility or States' rights. They did it by talking about Good and Evil and tacitly endorsing the notion that the existence of the State of Israel, the war in Iraq and 9/11 are in fact a prelude to a biblical event.

Well, this week President Bush offered his own 'left behind' theory. The Bush version works like this: if you are poor or middle class, you will be left behind. This is because the vast majority of the projected ten-year, $1.9 trillion dollar redistribution of government revenues that President Bush advocates through permanent tax cuts will go to the very richest Americans. By definition, this will drain resources from desperately needed services used by the poor and middle class, like public education, Medicare and the 911 Emergency Response System.

President Bush will argue that the redistributed wealth will eventually stimulate enough economic activity to make up for these lost revenues. Unfortunately, it is having an immediate and exploding effect on the deficit, which places added pressure on the structure of the American economy and makes the possibility of this scenario a long shot at best.

The final, but most important pillar of Born Again Economics: fear. Charlatans, false prophets and the Bush political team know that fear motivates. Vice President Dick Cheney stooped low enough to say America stood a better chance of being attacked if people voted for Senator John Kerry. President George W. Bush even sold the War on Iraq by telling Congress and the country that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapon. That was scary. It wasn't true. But it was scary.

Now Bush has opened his Evangelical tool kit to sell wholesale changes in Social Security, doing everything but strapping on a poster board that reads, 'The end is near'. Unfortunately, few outside the Administration have concluded that the end is near enough to warrant wholesale changes or that privatization will help workers in the long run. Nearly everyone concludes, however, that privatization will make Wall Street money in the short run, and add even more to the bloated deficit.

And that is the key to Born Again Economics: it's the short-term payoff that seems to matter. That would explain the President's willingness to pass a massive debt burden onto future Americans. It's not exactly the American dream or sound economic policy. But for some reason, that doesn't seem to bother this President.

Blaine Townsend (blaine2024@yahoo.com) is a San Francisco-based investment advisor.



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