Feb 8 2005
Editorial: BUSH'S BUDGET: InnumeracySt. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 Feb
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"President Bush has proposed a budget that shows a poor grasp of basic arithmetic. He plans to cut the deficit while spending hundreds of billions more each year on the war in Iraq, cutting taxes by $2.1 trillion dollars over a decade and spending another trillion or two transforming Social Security.
In grade school, this kind of math would get an "F" grade. In Congress, the president gets an "A-plus" from his fellow Republicans for vision and boldness...
There are other dubious bookkeeping tricks in the Bush budget. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, points out that the administration would treat the proposed extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts as having already been enacted. That would mean that estimates of the cost of making the tax cuts permanent would be zero, instead of the real cost, $2.1 trillion over 10 years."
Seattle PI, 8 Feb
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"The large tables in President Bush's new budget show that he intends to keep his promise to halve the federal deficit by the end of his term, but the fine print indicates that the goal may be hard to attain.
The budget is notable for including limits on spending that are unlikely to be enacted and for excluding expenses that are sure to be incurred.
'It's a very unrealistic budget for a document that is supposed to reflect the president's policies,' said Robert Bixby, executive director of The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan organization that lobbies for deficit reduction."
Washington Post, 8 Feb
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"THERE ARE TWO ways to treat a president's budget proposal. The realistic, even cynical, method is to unmask the various bits of budget gimmickry involved, to assume that some aspects are dead on arrival, and to view the document as the administration's opening gambit in a long political chess match. The other is to take it seriously, as the administration's idealized vision of what government should be. Either way, the fiscal 2006 budget proposed yesterday by President Bush is breathtaking -- in the first approach as farce, in the second as tragedy.
First, the farcical aspects: To meet its claimed target of cutting the deficit in half by 2009, the new budget omits the cost of the war in Iraq; the cost of the president's proposed private accounts for Social Security; and the cost of correcting the alternative minimum tax, which is hitting growing numbers of middle-class taxpayers rather than the rich it is intended for...
'It's a budget that sets priorities,' Mr. Bush told reporters yesterday. That it does. The problem is that some of those priorities are flat wrong."
- Eric Devericks, Seattle Times
- Mike Lane, Baltimore Sun
- David Horsey, Seattle PI
- Ben Sargent, Austin American-Statesman
- Scott Stantis, The Birmingham News for USA TODAY
- Tom Toles, Washington Post
- Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe
Foreign Press
News: Military escapes the Bush cash cuts
The Australian, 9 Feb
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"IN a guns-over-butter budget, George W. Bush has pushed huge increases for the US military while calling for politically ambitious - and possibly doomed - cuts to farm subsidies and other sensitive programs in a bid to rein in the massive US budget deficit.
The 2006 budget sent to Congress yesterday continues to run deeply in the red with no sign in the foreseeable future of the US returning to the budget surpluses enjoyed during the booming economy of the late 1990s under Democrat Bill Clinton."
BBC, 7 Feb
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"News coverage of the Bush budget will be dominated by debates about spending cuts, but the fact is these will be large cuts in small programs.
From the standpoint of the big fiscal trends, the cuts are gratuitous and the big budget train wreck is yet to come...
The trigger for the coming shock will be rising federal debt, which will grow in 10 years, by conservative estimates, to more than half the nation's total annual output...
Federal revenues are at 1950s levels, while spending remains where it has been in recent decades - much higher.
In addition, the United States has two significant military missions.
The Bush administration's chosen remedy is the least feasible one. Reducing domestic spending, or eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse" is toothless because this slice of the budget is too small to solve the problem. "
, 8 Feb
