Erie County's Very Own Dubya

Well, Bush got himself elected. Are you ready for four more years of mendacity, hypocrisy, moralizing, deficit hiking and verbal Twister?

Me neither. But one good thing did happen with the election - it ended, so now we can start thinking about other things.

For one, Erie County is bankrupt. A slash-and-burn budget is on the table right now. This "red budget," as it's called, kills all funding to arts, parks and libraries and cuts money for cops and health care. If William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea were a budget, it would be this one.

The blame for this crisis sits squarely on the shoulders of Joel Giambra, our county executive, whose abject incompetence stakes his claim to a dubious honor: our very own George W. Bush.

When Giambra, a Republican, took office in 1999 he cut property taxes by 30 percent. Good move, it seemed; he said that high taxes were hurting the county's businesses.

But he failed to find any new revenue, so he was forced to spend tens of millions of dollars in reserves that the last county executive, Dennis Gorski, was saving for a rainy day. Gorski knew that state Medicaid mandates would some day reach a point where they'd bankrupt the county had it not saved a lot of money.

That day has come. The Medicaid mandates are in, and we've run out of cash because of Giambra's huge tax cut.

Giambra says that to solve the crisis, the state should reform Medicaid right away and raise sales taxes in the county by a penny. He's playing hardball by proposing the red budget. It would be a bluff were he actually bluffing.

Granted, the state needs to reform its Medicaid rules. Its mandates to towns, cities and counties are often unfairly steep.

But counties don't have to be totally wrecked if their leaders have been wise. Other counties have saved their money or raised some of the taxes they had cut. And Giambra's plan to hike the sales tax by a penny hurts the economy and low-income residents at the same time.

Giambra was once a Democrat. But the mess he has made with our county shows that he's a Republican through and through. His GOP vision has failed the county just as the national GOP vision will fail America.

There are plenty of reasons to object to GOP fiscal policies. But the fact that they are not sustainable is the most important.

Whatever their dogma says, each recent Republican president has spent more money that he has brought in. Republicans put their governments on non-sustainable paths.

Fiscal crisis has happened faster in Erie County because the law requires the county to balance its budget each year. But if America sticks with the GOP's non-sustainable fiscal policies, the federal government will soon face a crisis similar to what the county faces now.

Social Security will run negative cash flows in 2018, according to the Social Security Administration. The whole trust fund will be exhausted by 2042, the 60th birthday of a UB senior.

We can avert this crisis by saving money and investing in Social Security - a fact that Bill Clinton and John Kerry realized.

Bush has no complete plan to save Social Security. He prefers running big deficits by fighting big wars and thus leaving the problem to you and I.

The American people have been lucky in the past. Whenever a Republican president caused a mess in the 20th century, a Democrat came in and cleaned it up. Roosevelt gave America hope during the Depression after Harding, Coolidge and Hoover's negligence. Carter cleaned up the environment that Nixon and Ford ignored. Clinton balanced the budget that Reagan and Bush drove into deficit.

Our worst Republican leaders, on the other hand, are like Daisy and Tom in "The Great Gatsby": they "smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it is that keeps them together."

We hoped that two weeks ago America would give John Kerry a chance to clean up George Bush's mess. Unfortunately, he won't get that chance.

And unless Erie County's Democrats get it together, no one will be there to clean up after Joel "Dubya" Giambra.