The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #62901   Message #1663810
Posted By: Amos
07-Feb-06 - 10:19 AM
Thread Name: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
Subject: RE: BS: Popular Views of the Bush Administration
Bush's budget sparks bipartisan protestMARTIN CRUTSINGERAssociated PressWASHINGTON - President Bush, constrained by wars, hurricanes and exploding budget deficits, has sent Congress a 2007 spending plan that is garnering howls of pain from farmers, teachers, doctors and a wide array of other groups with special interests.
Democrats, as expected, pronounced the Republican president's budget plan dead on arrival. But many Republicans were equally sharp in their reservations about the $2.77 trillion spending blueprint the administration unveiled on Monday.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., called Bush's proposed cuts in education and health "scandalous" while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said she was "disappointed and even surprised" at the extent of the administration's proposed cuts in Medicaid and Medicare.
Given the level of congressional frustration, administration witnesses, led by Treasury Secretary John Snow, were expected to face a tough sales job before various congressional committees on Tuesday.
Bush's spending blueprint for the 2007 budget year that begins Oct. 1 would provide large increases for the military and homeland security but would trim spending in the one-sixth of the budget that covers the rest of discretionary spending. Nine Cabinet agencies would see outright reductions with the biggest percentage cuts occurring in the departments of Transportation, Justice and Agriculture.
And in mandatory programs - so-called because the government must provide benefits to all who qualify - the president is seeking over the next five years savings of $36 billion in Medicare, $5 billion in farm subsidy programs, $4.9 billion in Medicaid support for poor children's health care and $16.7 billion in additional payments from companies to shore up the government's besieged pension benefit agency.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley noted that Congress has just completed a yearlong battle to achieve far smaller five-year savings in Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for the poor, and Medicare as part of a $39 billion five-year trim in benefit programs.
"It wasn't an easy legislative accomplishment," said Grassley, R-Iowa. "Any more reductions of a significant scope could be difficult this year."
Bush's budget would meet his twin goals of making permanent his first-term tax cuts, which are set to expire by 2010, and cutting the deficit in half by 2009, the year he leaves office.
The administration's new budget projects that this year's deficit will soar to an all-time high of $423 billion, surpassing the old mark in dollar terms of $412 billion set in 2004, as the costs of rebuilding from last year's devastating hurricanes and the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan push spending higher. ...

(From The Mercury News.

A