Unfunded Mandates, AGAIN

President Bush - who has "worst president ever" in his sights and may shoot for "most incompetent elected official ever" if he has time - has come out with yet another bad idea. Following hard on his post-election conversion to balanced budgets, Bush has proposed to make cuts in Medicaid and Medicare.

I know you're asking why I would be against this. I've made it pretty clear I think out-of-control entitlement spending is one of the country's largest fiscal problems, and these proposals would reduce some of that spending. Have six years of conservatism betrayed given me a pathological and irrational hatred of Bush?

No. What's actually going on here, as you may have guessed, is window dressing. First of all, the cuts total a mere $23 billion over the next five years, a drop in the multi-trillion-dollar bucket of entitlement spending. Nothing proposed here reforms the overall product or the health-care industry.

Secondly, some of the proposals - if passed - will make it even harder to educate America's schoolchildren:

School districts get reimbursed for arranging speech and physical therapy for Medicaid-eligible students. For example, when a student with autism gets speech therapy, the school can seek reimbursement for scheduling the therapy, confirming it gets done and transporting the student to the therapist, said Mary Kusler of the American Association of School Administrators.

The president's regulatory proposal would eliminate Medicaid reimbursement for those services, she said. The administration estimates the savings at $3.6 billion over five years.

Kusler said students would still get the therapy needed to help them learn — schools have no choice in the matter. However, they may have to cut back other programs to offset the loss of federal funding.

"This would transfer the burden onto local school districts and local taxpayers," Kusler said.

This is what is known as an "unfunded mandate," whereby the federal (or a state) government mandates something but refuses to pay for it. Sadly, this is no rare thing in the case of education: the feds passed expansive Special Education laws decades ago, but even now don't fund more than 15-20 percent of the total cost. Since the local districts will still have to pay for these special services, they will be faced with two choices: cut other programs that are not mandated, or increase the local tax burden just to keep the same level of education. Wonderful.