WASHINGTON - President Bush sent the nation's first-ever $3 trillion budget proposal to Congress on Monday, contending that the spending blueprint will fulfill his chief responsibility to keep America safe.
The $3.1 trillion proposed budget projects sizable increases in national security but forces the rest of government to pinch pennies. It seeks $196 billion in savings over five years in the government's giant health care programs - Medicare and Medicaid.
But even with those restraints, the budget projects the deficits will soar to near-record levels of $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009, driven higher in part by efforts to revive the sagging economy with a $145 billion stimulus package.
Bush called the document, which protects his signature tax cuts, "a good, solid budget" But Democrats, and even a top Republican, attacked the plan for using budgetary gimmicks to claim the budget can return to balance in 2012, three years after Bush leaves office.
President Bush has sent a $3.1 trillion dollar gimmicky budget that is going to project deficits to soar to over $400 billion, just after he leaves office. It is really Bush governing at his finest--leave wreckage of his failed presidency to his successor. McClatchy News has more information on this $400 billion deficit in Bush's budget:
WASHINGTON — President Bush took office in 2001 with a budget surplus, but his final budget proposal envisions federal deficits of more than $400 billion a year for the next two years. As big as those numbers are, experts think that the administration is lowballing the deficits, and they put little stock in Bush's vow to balance the budget by 2012.
"I think the promise that it will be balanced by 2012 is ridiculous," said Chris Edwards, the director of tax policy for the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy research group.
Bush's estimates of a $410 billion deficit this fiscal year and $407 billion for fiscal 2009, budget experts said, rely on very low assumptions of war costs, unrealistic estimates on tax collection and spending cuts that won't sell politically, regardless of which party is in charge of Congress.
"No sensible analyst takes this (budget) estimate seriously," said Robert Greenstein, the executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Edwards pointed to $70 billion in emergency Iraq and Afghanistan war costs budgeted for the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1, a figure he called "totally phony" because it could easily end up closer to $200 billion, as it has in recent years.
This is the major point of Bush's budget deficit--the $400-plus billion deficit is based on low assumptions of the Iraq war costs. The Bush administration is budgeting $70 billion in emergency spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But that is not enough to fund the war. For 2007, the Bush administration needed to spend $196.4 billion in funding the Iraq war. We are seeing the same shadow games of this Bush administration pushing the costs of these wars out of the budget, then coming back to Congress asking for more emergency spending. And if Congress does not approve of the extra Bush emergency spending, well, Congress is not supporting the troops, and the U.S. will lose Iraq to the terrorists. This has been going on since the Bush administration invaded Iraq. And now we are looking at the total cost for this Bush failed war in Iraq to be approaching $2.4 trillion dollars over the next decade.
Of course, back in 2003, the Bush administration was estimating the costs of the Iraq war to be around $50 billion.
And you know what is even more crazy? The Bush administration actually admits that they've completely low-balled their $70 billion Iraq war estimate, and they admit that funding the war will cost even more than what they've budgeted for. Consider this from the MSNBC News story:
White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters that the war effort in 2009 would "certainly" cost more than the $70 billion included in the budget.
So I guess the Bush administration has admitted that they are going to lie this year about how much they are going to spend on the Iraq war. What else is new?
How about this little New York Times detail on military spending in the Bush budget:
The spending package for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 included no big surprises, especially since its key elements had already been reported in detail in recent days. The Pentagon’s proposed budget, for instance, is $515.4 billion, an increase of 7.5 percent over this year, meaning that military spending would be the highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. And the White House’s plans for trimming Medicare and Medicaid have also been previewed.
In other words, we're basically spending the about the same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars today with the military, as we were since the Second World War. And I'm guessing that this $515 billion Pentagon budget doesn't even include the $200 billion emergency supplemental spending needed to continue the Iraq war. So total Pentagon spending will actually be around $700 billion dollars--not $515 billion as projected by the Bush administration.
What do you expect from a warmonger?
There is certainly more in this Bush disaster of a budget. While the Bush administration is pushing for more money to spend on their wars, they are also playing political games with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) According to McClatchy News:
Although Bush offers a one-year patch to keep the creeping alternative minimum tax from ensnaring millions of taxpayers, his budget would allow the tax to hit 38 million Americans by 2012. That would be tantamount to a huge tax increase.
Late last year, Congress approved a one-year patch for the AMT, a tax that must be calculated in parallel to standard income taxes. This patch wasn't paid for, however, and so it added to the federal deficit, which will grow by roughly $150 billion once Congress passes an economic stimulus later this month.
President Bush is going to keep the one-year AMT patch for his term, but allow it to slowly expire during his successor's term. This keeps the Bush administration from admitting that they had to raise taxes to cover the huge deficits, but then force a potential Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama administration to force a painful tax increase on the American people in order restore some fiscal insanity to the federal government. If a tax increase is passed, the Republican Party will wail about how the Democrats are nothing more than "tax and spend liberals," who are destroying the American middle class. And the next Republican presidential candidate--can you say Jeb Bush--will vow to stimulate the economy by....Cutting taxes! Of course, this AMT patch that Congress provided was never paid for, thus adding to the federal debt. And you can bet that George W. Bush would love this AMT patch because it will never be paid for as well--just add it to the federal debt!
Now how about we get into some spending cuts. From McClatchy News:
To balance the budget later, Bush envisions sharp spending cuts in popular programs for the elderly and a spending freeze on everything the government isn't required to pay for.
Few expect Congress to make deep cuts in such programs as energy assistance to the poor, disease control and space exploration. And experts don't see Congress agreeing to Bush's suggestion to reduce Medicare spending by $556 billion over the next 10 years — just as politically active baby boomers — Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — begin retiring en masse after 2010.
Once war costs and revenue lost to AMT patches are factored in, annual federal deficits are likely to exceed $500 billion, forcing the U.S. government to issue more debt.
The New York Times has some more details on Bush's cutting of Medicare and Medicaid budgets:
Mr. Bush said his budget would slow “the unsustainable growth of entitlement spending” with proposed savings of $208 billion over five years. This includes savings of $178 billion in Medicare, $17 billion in Medicaid and $6 billion in student aid programs. The president proposes to raise $2 billion from new enrollment fees and higher pharmacy co-payments for certain veterans receiving health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
All I can think of here is that this latest Bush budget is a frickin' disaster. It is a warmongering budget of spending so much more of our treasure on guns, the defense industry, Haliburton no-bid contracts, and Big Oil excessive profits, while still destroying the social safety net for this nation's citizens. Will the Democrats in Congress stand up and say no to this latest Bush disaster? I doubt it. Nothing will really be done until after the November presidential elections. But even then, I wonder if it will be too late to fix this nation's problems even with a Democratic president stepping into the Oval Office in January, 2009.
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