From Kathy Gill,
Your Guide to US Politics.
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Feb 8 2005

Editorial: Mean, not lean/Bush's abysmal budget
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 8 Feb

"On Monday, President Bush sent Congress the most austere federal budget in perhaps 30 years, a plan that would slash aid to cities by one-third, eliminate health insurance for thousands of low-income families, reduce veterans' medical benefits, cut funding for city cops and county sheriffs, wipe out child care subsidies for 300,000 families, trim funding for clean water and soil conservation and shutter dozens of programs for preschool children and at-risk youth.

These are not the priorities that Americans voted for in 2000 and 2004...

What Bush wants to ignore, however, is that it's his own policies that have largely created today's red ink. No longer can he blame the recession; that ended three years ago. He can't blame the struggle against terrorism; those costs aren't even included in his budget proposal. No, to paraphrase an articulate governor we know, Washington doesn't have a spending problem, it has a revenue problem. Federal outlays this year will be lower, as a share of the economy, than they were 10 years ago. But after Bush championed four tax cuts in four years, federal revenues have fallen to the lowest share of gross domestic product since 1959.

Astonishingly, the president seems to think that revenues should go even lower. His budget includes a raft of new tax cuts and a plan to make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent...

The president seems to think he can run a 21st-century nation on a Mamie Eisenhower budget, taking Americans back to a time before Medicare, the Interstate Highway System, the Environmental Protection Agency and other great strides of the last half-century. That might be fine for the 1 percent who can care for themselves with the Bush administration's tax cuts, but it is a ruinous direction for everyone else."

News/Analysis: Budget tabulations are a numbers game
Newsday, 8 Feb

"President George W. Bush says his new budget makes good on his promise to cut the deficit in half in five years, down from $521 billion.

When did the deficit hit that lofty height?

Never.

Bush is using some creative accounting to claim victory - basing his claim on a deficit guess for last year that came in too high, so that his cuts look deeper in comparison. Using the actual dollar figures, he falls short of his goal.

It's just one example of the fiscal sleight-of-hand Bush used in his 2006 spending plan, but the kind that critics charge makes for a disingenuous reading of the nation's fiscal health."

Analysis: Intangibles like war costs, Social Security revamp muddle deficit forecast
San Francisco Chronicle, 8 Feb

Nariman Behravesh, an economist with the Massachusetts-based Global Insight consultancy, notes that from 1970 through 2010, "which is as far as the budget projections go ... federal expenditures have averaged 20.4 percent of GDP. Under Bush, expenditures have been or are projected to hover around 19.5 percent of GDP.

By comparison, federal revenues have averaged 18.2 percent of GDP over the same four decades. Under Bush, the federal take has gone as low as 16.4 percent of GDP and will barely hit 18 percent of GDP by 2010, he said.

'It's not that spending has run amok,' he said. 'We've simply cut revenues too much.'

Mark Zandi, chief economist for the Economy.com consulting firm, likened deficits to a disease that taxes the nation's ability to save for and invest in future growth.

'The prospect for persistent, large budget deficits is the nation's most significant economic problem,' Zandi said, adding, 'The president's budget doesn't do enough to address them.' "

Editorial: Bush's bad math
San Francisco Chronicle, 8 Feb

"There is a great paradox in the president's stated concern for the solvency of Social Security and his budget's plan to borrow $170 billion from its trust fund to help build his fiscal 2006 budget.

One of the reasons that Bush is forced to tap the Social Security trust fund and conceal the full costs of Iraq and Afghanistan is that his dogged refusal to consider repeal of his tax cuts has severely limited his revenue options. Congressional Budget Office data suggest that tax cuts enacted since 2001 account for almost half of the deficit increases in recent years."