Let’s see, now. Take the cost of rebuilding New Orleans and the three devastated states — say $200 billion. Add the cost of running that war over in Iraq — say $100 billion and rising. Call it $300 billion. Time to call a halt to tax cuts.

Not a bit of it.

Here’s Dubya’s latest word on the question:

On Friday, Bush ruled out raising taxes to pay the massive costs of Gulf Coast reconstruction, saying other government spending — which neither he nor his aides identified — must be cut to pay for a recovery effort expected to swell the budget deficit by $200 billion or more.

“You bet it’s going to cost money. But I’m confident we can handle it,” he said at a White House news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Congress already has approved $62 billion for the disaster, but that is expected to run out next month and require another budget-busting installment. The federal deficit was projected at $333 billion for the current year before the storm slammed into the Gulf Coast more than two weeks ago. Some fiscal conservatives are expressing alarm at the prospect of massive additional federal outlays without talk of what other spending to cut.

The Seattle Times comments that

The proposed record reconstruction spending in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, estimated as high as $200 billion, is all but certain to add to a mushrooming national debt that already has the country dependent on foreign investors.

The sum is about equal to what has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s almost half the size of this year’s domestic discretionary spending, essentially everything the government does besides national defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

President Bush vowed yesterday to rebuild the tattered Gulf Coast, “whatever it costs.” He ruled out tax increases, which means the new spending will add to the burden on taxpayers from the federal budget deficit, now $331 billion, and the national debt, now $4.6 trillion.

“It means we’re going to have to make sure we cut unnecessary spending,” Bush said. “It’s going to mean that we maintain economic growth and we should not raise taxes.”

Lovely column by Maureen Dowd…

In a ruined city – still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers – isn’t it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?

The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.’s “High Noon” snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting – the same Reaganesque stagecraft they had provided when W. made a prime-time television address from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On that occasion, Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, and Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and a lighting expert, rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used for “Monday Night Football” and Rolling Stones concerts, floated them across New York Harbor and illuminated the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop for Mr. Bush.

Before the presidential address, Mr. DeServi was surveying his handiwork in Jackson Square, crowing to reporters about his cathedral: “Oh, it’s heated up. It’s going to print loud.”