Bush Giving Congress $2.4 Trillion Budget
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) is sending Congress a $2.4 trillion election-year budget that provides big increases to the military and homeland security while squeezing scores of other programs in an effort to cut a deficit projected to top a half-trillion dollars this year.
Bush's spending plan, contained in a four-volume set of documents to be released Monday, will set off an intense battle in Congress and on the campaign trail as Democrats and Republicans try to convince voters that their economic prescription for the country is the right one.
The president's budget would make his tax cuts permanent, while many of the Democrats campaigning for his job are seeking to roll back the tax relief, at least for the wealthiest Americans, as a way to get deficits under control.
The blueprint for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 calls for spending $2.399 trillion and collecting $2.036 trillion in revenues, leaving a deficit of $363 billion for 2005, Republican officials said before the budget's release.
Military spending would be boosted by 7 percent, but that does not include money needed to keep troops in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) after the current $87.5 billion wartime supplemental runs out. Officials said a new supplemental will not be requested until 2005, after the November elections.
Homeland security, another top priority, would receive a 10 percent boost, including an 11 percent increase in FBI (news - web sites) funding to support increased counterterrorism activities.
In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush said his budget would allow the American people to have a clear view of his priorities.
"We will devote the resources necessary to win the war on terror and protect our homeland," he said. "And we'll be responsible with the people's money by cutting the deficit in half over five years."
Bush projects the deficit in the current year will hit $521 billion, an all-time high in dollar terms, surpassing last year's record of $374 billion. His budget projects the deficit will gradually decline to $237 billion in 2009.
Those deficit figures, which are worse than the administration was projecting last summer, reflect in part the jump, from $400 billion to $534 billion, in its estimate of the 10-year cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit Congress passed in November.
Democrats hope to make the soaring deficits a campaign issue.
"He's promising a trillion-dollar tax cut and a trip to Mars. And he has a half-trillion-dollar deficit," former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (news - web sites) said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Democratic National Committee (news - web sites) Chairman Terry McAuliffe said the administration's suddenly higher Medicare estimate raised the same questions about credibility as did its changing justifications for going to war in Iraq.
"The president has misled us day in and day out on every single issue," McAuliffe said on ABC's "This Week."
The Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites) has estimated that Bush's proposal to make the 2001 and 2003 individual tax cuts permanent would cost an additional $1.2 trillion on top of the original 10-year price tag of $1.7 trillion. The cuts now are scheduled to phase out by 2010.
Bush's budget also contains money to undertake an ambitious program to return Americans to the moon as early as 2015 and eventually send a mission to Mars. The $12 billion earmarked for the effort over the next five years only includes $1 billion in new money, however; the rest is reallocated from existing NASA (news - web sites) programs.
The juggling of money for the Mars mission was duplicated in a number of other areas where Bush outlined modest increases for favored initiatives while taking money from scores of other programs.
Areas that would receive boosts in Bush's budget include his No Child Left Behind education program; job training programs, including one that links community colleges with employers' and an $18 million increase for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Bush's budget proposes to hold the spending increase for all of the government's discretionary programs — those other than such fixed expenses as Social Security (news - web sites) and Medicare — to 3.9 percent in 2005. That average rise includes big boosts for the military and homeland security.
Scores of government programs outside those two areas will be restrained to an overall increase of just 0.5 percent, below the rise in inflation, and some agencies will suffer outright cuts.
It is uncertain, however, how much success Bush will have in persuading lawmakers to constrain a broad swath of government, especially in an election year.
"Progress needs to be made on the deficit, but that isn't likely to happen this year. Nobody likes to inflict pain in an election year," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York. |
