President Bush yesterday sent Congress his 2008 budget, a $2.9 trillion behemoth that sets spending records. The big losers are the American people, who would see sharp cuts to health care, education, environmental programs, and development assistance. Additionally, this budget shows that Bush’s commitment to fiscal discipline–like his commitment to eradicating inequality–is nothing more than empty rhetoric. Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policies John Irons notes, “According to the president’s own numbers, the proposed tax policies would add $600 billion to deficits over the next five years and $1.9 trillion over the next 10.” The president has “consistently understated the effect on deficits and debt of their budget, and unfortunately America is going being to be in deep hock after this administration leaves town,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) said last night on PBS.
- The president’s budget guarantees a fiscal fiasco for years to come. Bush claims that his 2008 budget is fiscally responsible because it will balance the federal budget by 2012. But as The Washington Post notes, Bush’s “balance is more illusory than real.” The $77 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid are unlikely to receive broad support from either party in Congress. He does not account for Iraq war costs beyond 2008, nor does he “include the cost of extending changes to the Alternative Minimum Tax beyond 2008,” which “would top $90 billion in 2012 alone.” It also “assumes the government will collect far more revenue than the Congressional Budget Office projects, amounting to a $150 billion difference in 2012.” Conrad said, “The president’s budget is filled with debt and deception.” Even Judd Gregg (R-NH), the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, admitted, “I don’t think it [Bush’s budget] has got a whole lot of legs.”
- From homeland security and defense to Medicare, Medicaid, and the environment, the president’s budget represents misguided choices and misplaced priorities for federal programs. According to the Congressional Research Service, total spending on the Iraq war for fiscal years 2001 through 2006 was $318.5 billion. The Bush budget would bring total proposed spending in Iraq to $683 billion through 2009, eclipsing the amount spent ($662 billion) in the 10-year Vietnam War. Another $140 billion is allocated for weapons procurement, research, and development. As The New York Times notes, much of this money is wasted on “products of cold war strategic thinking [that] have outlived their rationale in a world with no superpower arms race.” The National Journal notes that “funding for state homeland security grants would be less than half the current level, falling from $510 million to $250 million. Grant assistance to firefighters would be cut from $662 million to $300 million. And law enforcement terrorism prevention program grants would drop from $363 million to $262 million.” At the same time, the “number of Americans without health insurance has grown to an unfathomable level–nearly 47 million.” Since 2000, 6.8 million people have lost health coverage, but SCHIP and Medicaid ensured that the proportion of low-income children without health insurance actually declined during this period, from 20 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2005.” Bush’s 2008 budget may reverse this positive trend. He proposes slashing the programs by at least $77 billion over the next five years, and $280 billion over the next 10. The president’s 2008 budget doesn’t live up to his rhetoric on the environment either, granting drilling leases in the Alaskan wilderness to oil companies and cutting the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency by $116 million. He has also proposed a $35 million decrease in funding “for state and local programs that help keep our air clean in our cities and states,” a $5 million decrease in funding for the EPA’s science and technology budget for climate protection, and a $7 million decrease in funding for cleanups at Superfund sites, efforts which are meant to clean up the nation’s most heavily contaminated toxic waste sites in communities across the country.”
- Once again, everyday Americans are left out in the cold. On Jan. 31, President Bush headed to Wall Street and acknowledged for the first time that income inequality exists in America: “The fact is that income inequality is real. It has been rising for more than 25 years.” But apparently, he’s not quite ready to do anything about it. Low and middle income Americans are hit the hardest by Bush’s 2008 budget. A total of 141 government programs will be eliminated or sharply reduced if the budget is enacted. Bush cuts housing for low income seniors by nearly 25 percent, a program to provide low income people with assistance paying heating costs by 18 percent, funding for low and middle income community development grants by 12.7 percent, and grants for education and employment training by eight percent. Wealthy Americans, however, will receive not have to suffer under Bush’s budget, which proposes making his tax cuts permanent at a cost of $1.6 trillion over 10 years. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, “if the president’s tax cuts are made permanent, households in the top one percent of the population (currently those with incomes over $400,000) will receive tax cuts averaging $67,000 a year by 2012. In today’s dollars, that amount is larger than the entire income of the typical American household.”