Christian Science Monitor, 8 Feb
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"The bottom line: a tight projected budget, plus the possibility of big undetailed costs arising later in the year, mean that the massive federal deficit may now affect US politics more than it did in Bush's first term...
Discretionary spending 'is a tiny fraction of the budget. You could eliminate the whole thing ... and you would barely cover the size of [Bush's] tax cuts,' said William Gale, a Brookings Institution budget analyst, at a seminar on the Bush agenda last week."
Dallas Morning News , 7 Feb
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"Let's look at the good parts first: After watching the budget move from a surplus to a deficit in his first term, the president's starting his second term with a budget that would lead to a smaller deficit...
But here's the troublesome part: The president wants military spending to grow by 4.8 percent. That increase highlights a worrisome trend: Defense expenditures continue to squeeze out initiatives that help families in Dallas and states like Texas. Look at community development block grants. The president's budget whacks them, although they help cities such as Dallas fight problems like homelessness."
Denver Post 8 Feb
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"The $2.57 trillion budget that President Bush sent to Congress yesterday will draw fire from deficit hawks who see that it doesn't give a realistic picture of what the government will spend in the upcoming fiscal year...
Bush's projected slowdown in the growth of defense spending may also prove to be a chimera, because the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are being handled in supplemental appropriations... That makes it clearer than ever that the cause of the current U.S. deficit - headed to a record $427 billion - lie largely in the three rounds of income-tax cuts since 2001, totaling $1.85 trillion over 10 years. As a result of those cuts, U.S. tax revenue will fall to 17 percent of gross domestic product this year, down from 21 percent in 2000 and the lowest in four decades. "
Houston Chronicle, 8 Feb
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"The budget includes a plan to shift a greater portion of Medicaid costs to the states, and an assumption that the federal government will begin collecting revenue from proposed drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
NASA, one of the few agencies that would see a proposed increase in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, would get a 2.4 percent boost to about $16.5 billion.
"'It will cost $1.9 trillion to privatize Social Security accounts, but there's not a penny in the budget to pay for that ideological blunder. Americans are spending $5 billion a month in Iraq, but there is not a penny in the budget to fund the war,' said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Bush's 2004 election foe. 'The numbers simply don't add up.'"
[o]f the 65 programs the White House proposed to cut last year, only five were actually eliminated, said Steve Ellis, vice president of programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a federal spending watchdog group."
International Herald Tribune (also NY Times), 8 Feb
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"[H]e's investing his precious re-election clout in pushing a wildly expensive plan to divert some Social Security payments to private accounts, a step that would not even address the long-term financial problems with the current system. His proposed budget, meanwhile, is a picture of reduced revenue and swollen pockets of hidden spending. The lip service about draconian clampdowns will hardly solve the problem, particularly in the eyes of the international markets that are studying the administration for signs of commitment to closing the budget deficit.
To his credit, for instance, Bush is asking for a reduction in farm and commodity programs. But his proposed cut of 5 percent - should it somehow survive in a Congress that has never shown signs of being willing to stand up to agribusiness - would hardly end that bloated giveaway. It offers little help for family farmers struggling to deal with the out-of-whack economics of an agricultural system that is distorted by monster subsidies to corporate farmers ...
Overall, the budget is a sham that takes big cuts out of politically vulnerable programs that have very little to do with the explosion of the deficit in Bush's tenure."