Turns out that food, education and health care are "special interests". Who knew?
WASHINGTON - 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.
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.
Democrats, hoping to wrest control of Congress from the Republicans in this year's election, charged that Bush was forced into an austere spending plan because of the estimated $1.4 trillion over the next decade that it will cost to extend his first-term tax cuts, which Democrats claim primarily benefit the very wealthy.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said Bush's budget was sending a clear message "that the most important thing to this administration are tax cuts being made permanent for the wealthiest of Americans."
This isn't going to fly. My prediction is that they will restore the cuts, especially to those "special interests" in the health care field, and they will increase the defense budget, too. If they make the tax cuts permanent, we might just bankrupt the country before the end of the decade. Whee!