By GREGORY N. HEIRES

The war in Iraq is starving the public sector at home of vital funds.

At a sleepy City Council budget hearing on March 24, New York Public Library Guild Local 1930 President Ray Markey brought the audience to life with a simple, factual statement:

“Twenty-five cruise missiles at a million dollars a pop would pay for the Library’s budget problems and make the layoff of 110 of our members unnecessary,” he said to loud applause.

As the nation spends $1.1 billion a day to wage war in Iraq, crucial dollars are being sucked out of the public sector.

Opinion polls say that a majority supports President George W. Bush’s war against Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Virtually all Americans worry about the U.S. troops in the Middle East hot zone and want them home as soon as possible.

But a lot of working people also worry about the economic consequences on the domestic front. As the economy continues to sputter and state governments face their greatest fiscal crisis since the 1930s, Mr. Bush’s war is draining resources from education, health and other services.

William Lucy, secretary-treasurer of DC 37’s parent union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, underscored labor’s concern about the war’s economic impact at AFSCME’s recent Legislative Conference.

Dollars for war or schools?
“As we lose millions of jobs, as unemployment grows, as poverty increases, as our services decline and our infrastructure crumbles, the administration’s response to this crisis is to invade Iraq,” he said at the March 17 conference.

“If they can find dollars for war, they can find the dollars for hospitals and schools, roads, prisons, water treatment and all the other services that maintain our jobs and quality of life,” Mr. Lucy said.

Despite the cost of the war, the president seeks a 10-year $726-billion tax cut — mostly for the wealthy — that would starve government programs. At the same time, Mr. Bush has told the country’s governors not to expect Washington to offer any fiscal relief from the record state budget deficits that approach $200 billion.

Together with the war costs and service reductions, progressive policy experts and economists warn that in the long term the tax cuts will put the federal government in a fiscal straitjacket.

And that is precisely the intention of proponents of the tax giveaways. “My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” said Grover Norquist, president of the right-wing group, Americans for Tax Reform.

So far, Mr. Bush has sought $75 billion for the initial costs of the war. But, warns Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus, “The economic ripples are likely to spread beyond the direct costs, with the prospect of raising the cost of imported oil, slowing productivity, and possible triggering a recession.”

The World Bank expects that in the first six months of 2003, the war will cost the global economy one-half percent in job-producing growth.

“The danger of tipping into recession is real, particularly given that the U.S. economy was growing very slowly in 2002,” said Nordhaus, one of the authors of a report on war costs by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Because of falling revenue and Mr. Bush’s first tax cut, the government surplus of $240 billion three years ago is now a $400 billion deficit.

In the long term, the war and Mr. Bush’s second tax cut could cause the deficit to explode, according to many economists. The result for American working people? Deep budget cuts and large tax increases.

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