Turning plowshares into swords, President Bush unveiled a $2.9 trillion budget Monday that increases military spending while reining in other costs in an effort to eliminate the deficit by 2012.
“Today we submit a budget to the United States Congress that shows we can balance the budget in five years without raising taxes,” Bush said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. “By keeping taxes down, we actually generate strong revenues to the Treasury.”
It was the first time Bush submitted a budget to a Democratic–controlled Congress, which immediately attacked the fiscal 2008 spending plan.
“The budget uses deception to hide a massive increase in debt,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “Its priorities are disconnected from the needs of middle-class Americans.”
Although Reid did not specifically mention tax increases, he said Democrats will produce their own version of the federal budget that makes “investments in priorities like health care, education and terrorism prevention.”
Such criticism did not faze Rob Portman, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“There was some immediate negative response that you might predict,” Portman said. “There’s also a lot of response that says ‘Let’s look at this’ — on both sides of the aisle.”
Portman said Bush extended an olive branch to the newly empowered Democrats by further delaying plans to partially privatize Social Security, a proposal that has long been anathema to Democrats. He also said the Bush budget tries to rein in the “mind-boggling” cost of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid by slowing their growth and forcing upper–income beneficiaries to pay more for benefits.
Such belt-tightening would help pay for hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures on the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the first time, such expenditures are being incorporated into the annual budget document instead of stand-alone supplemental budget requests.
“Why did we decide to do it? Because we heard loud and clear from Congress,” Portman said in response to questions by The Examiner. “They were seeking more transparency, and more and better information sooner, so they could conduct appropriate oversight.”
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said the Bush budget does not reflect the fact that Democrats captured control of Congress three months ago.
“Sadly, the president missed an important opportunity today to put forward a budget that demonstrated that he listened to the American people last November,” Kennedy said. “This budget would continue us down the wrong path, but fortunately the new Congress is determined to change course — and will.”
For more details on the budget, see our Agency-by-Agency breakdown.
