Our rich uncle is distracted. Preoccupied with his enemies, he’s less eager to help us Iowans with our problems.

If President Bush gets his way, Uncle Sam will increase the budget for international affairs and foreign aid by 22.5 percent. The funding for agriculture, still a vital part of Iowa’s economy, will drop by 13.3 percent.

Interest expenses will jump by 18.6 percent because we plunged from a balanced budget into a deep deficit over the past four years. Spending on education, job training and social services – the first two items are generally seen as crucial to Iowa’s future – will drop by 3.8 percent.

The president wants to save $60 billion over 10 years by making major changes in the Medicaid program. But pushing a problem downhill to the states doesn’t make it disappear.

Democrats in the Iowa Senate said in a press release about state finances, “Additional cuts in reimbursement rates to local doctors and hospitals will reduce access to care, which is effectively refusing to provide care. . . . The state’s failure to fund Medicaid increases your own insurance costs and undermines the financial health of health care providers across the state.”

The most conservative members of the Republican Party supposedly want to shrink government down to a size where we can drown it in a bathtub, in the words of lower-tax advocate Grover Norquist. That’s worrisome enough.

It’s even more alarming if the real goal is to drown domestic programs focusing on people with the least political clout while turning the military-industrial complex into an Olympic-class swimmer.

Here in Iowa, our participation in the military-industrial end of things is minimal. So it looks as if we don’t have any time to waste in building the strongest state economy we can, an economy that adds value to farm products and pulls in lots of new money from elsewhere, because our uncle wants us to leave him alone so he can write checks to his more favored relatives.

We’re a long way from knowing what the final federal budget will look like. But this is as good a time as any to start calculating just what “small government” might really look like, how it might change our social values and how much we’ll have to spend to adapt.

The federal government throws around money that it doesn’t have in an effort to keep everybody happy. Iowa tries to live on a budget, but still wants lots of happiness. Could be tough to do.