Bush Proposes Cuts to Scores of Programs

I laud Bush for these proposed cuts, particularly the reduction in agricultural subsidies; that's a politically difficult move. It's also a long-overdue move. Ag subsidies are market distorting and expensive.

As far as the other programs go, the electorate voted for tax reductions, and we should all remember that a reduction in revenue must, at some point, be paid for by a reduction in spending. With the current account deficit so high, reducing the budget deficit is a great idea.

It is, indeed, time to pay the piper.

aside from the realization that the Bush "budget" is presented with smoke and mirrors, that both the dems and repubs will shred it, (everyone wants to get re-elected) it would (if realized) be a debt inhancer not a reducer. Only if you project out at least 10 years with a very hopeful attitude can you see a hint of clear sky. What this "budget" does accomplish is create an attitude that the republican/conservative agenda of reducing social programs while increasing military programs is the primary focus. All of which is worthy of adult discussion, unfortunately, the Bush/Republican methodology is currently invested in smoke and mirrors while the dems are invested in mirrors and smoke.

You can't have it both ways. I agree with Steppenwolf, that the cuts in agricultural subsidies should have happened long ago. Government belongs in the defense business.....................I think that there is no good reason that they should be a major part of the economic life of the country. Bush understands this, and is taking the appropriate steps.

On the other hand, the government does not belong in our bedrooms either!

BM

WASHINGTON The economy is growing. Tax revenue is climbing. But can these factors rescue President George W. Bush from a federal deficit that seems stuck above $400 billion?.
The answer, unfortunately, is almost certainly no, many analysts say..
For all the programs that Bush slashed in his budget proposal made on Monday - from health care and housing aid to the Amtrak passenger train system - the cuts would total less than $15 billion next year and would barely dent the deficit..
By far the biggest parts of the budget - Medicare, Social Security and military spending - would be immune to cuts, and they are expected to grow rapidly for years to come..
On top of that, Bush's plan to replace part of the Social Security system with private savings accounts could require additional trillions of dollars in borrowing over the next several decades..
The cornerstone of Bush's budget strategy is a belief that vigorous economic growth, spurred by tax cuts intended to provide incentives for upper-income Americans to produce more wealth, will generate big increases in tax revenue that will gradually reduce the deficit..
At first glance, Bush might seem to have grounds for optimism..
After all, surging tax revenue did come to Washington's rescue during the economic boom of the 1990s, pushing the budget from deficit to surplus. Republican and Democratic budget analysts, however, say that such an event is much less likely this time around..
Bush's own projections leave out the cost of rolling back the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax that is expected to ensnare tens of millions of middle-income households as incomes rise with inflation. Republicans and Democrats both want to prevent such a trap, but a fix would cost about $500 billion over the next 10 years..
"I don't think we are likely to see a repeat of the 1990s," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office. "We can't grow our way out of this." .
As Bush unveiled his budget plan, White House officials said they hoped to focus public attention on his proposals to cut scores of domestic programs: Medicaid, housing programs and Amtrak subsidies, among others. .
But while many of those cuts would be severe, their impact on the deficit would be small..
Administration officials have proposed changes that they say would reduce Medicaid spending by $60 billion over 10 years, or about $6 billion a year. Bush would cut spending on community development programs, consolidating 18 programs into two and reducing annual outlays from $5.6 billion to $3.7 billion..
Eliminating operating subsidies for Amtrak, which would face intense opposition in Congress, would save about $1.2 billion a year. In all, Bush has vowed to reduce or eliminate 150 programs. But Republican congressional analysts said Friday that those cuts would be unlikely to save more than $15 billion. And even those savings may not materialize..
Last year, Bush called for cutting or eliminating 65 programs, for a total projected savings of $4.8 billion. But Congress agreed to eliminate only four of those programs, for a savings of less than $200 million..
The other side of Bush's equation, higher tax revenue resulting from faster growth, is unlikely to fill the gap..
Despite economic growth and soaring corporate profits last year, federal revenue amounted to only 16.3 percent of the total economy, comparable to levels in the 1950s and far below the level of 21 percent reached during the stock market bubble in 2000..
Tax revenue soared far beyond expectations during the economic boom of the late 1990s, but budget analysts have said there is little likelihood of its repeating that feat in this decade..
One reason is that Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 went largely to the wealthiest taxpayers, the same people who accounted for that unexpected flood of tax revenue before..
White House officials are already counting on tax revenue to surge by at least $200 billion this year, an increase of about 10 percent, and to climb more gradually after that. But even Bush's conservative allies have warned that this expected increase will not be enough to cover the continued growth in overall government spending..
Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group, estimated that deficits would remain at $400 billion annually through 2009 if current spending trends on Iraq and major benefit programs continued..
For Bush to fulfill his vow of cutting the deficit in half by 2009, Riedl said, the president would have to cut $200 billion from domestic programs that now cost less than $500 billion a year..
"There is no way you can reach that goal by cutting only discretionary spending," Riedl said. "You have to go after entitlements as well.".
About two-thirds of the $2.3 trillion federal budget now goes to entitlement programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that costs for Medicare will rise $55 billion in 2005, to $380 billion. Social Security outlays are expected to rise to $540 billion from $517 billion..
But Bush has focused almost all of his budget cuts on discretionary domestic programs that cost a total of $466 billion last year..
Freezing spending at current levels on the vast array of programs that Washington supports - allowing them to grow only at the rate of inflation - would save about $10 billion next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office; a politically difficult reduction of 1 percent would save about $15 billion..
Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has said that neither Bush's spending cuts nor his hope of strong economic growth will be enough to close the gap..
"You can't get there from here unless you look at entitlements," Gregg said last week..
.
Regulator's budget is cut.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the country's top regulator of financial markets, would get 2.7 percent less to spend next fiscal year under President George W. Bush's proposed 2006 budget, news agencies reported. .
The agency would receive $888 million, down from $913 million for the current fiscal year. The 2006 request includes $25 million that the agency did not spend this year, said Matt Well, a spokesman for the commission. .
The commission's budget has nearly tripled over the past decade after a crackdown on scandals in corporate America, on Wall Street and in the mutual fund industry..
The crackdown has expanded the commission's workload and will continue to do so. But with the U.S. government facing a massive budget deficit, the commission, like many other agencies, is under pressure to hold down spending..
"The budget is appropriate given the fiscal environment," Well said. "It allows us to glide to a more stable funding pattern, while continuing to fund major initiatives." (Bloomberg, Reuters).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6230-2005Feb7.html?nav=hcmodule

Congress Unlikely to Embrace Bush Wish List
Experts Say Cuts in Farm Subsidies, Medicaid and Other Domestic Programs May Be Unrealistic
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 8, 2005; Page A06


With his 2006 budget, President Bush delivered Congress a tall order, asking for at least six significant governmental reorganizations and an unprecedented five-year freeze in domestic spending to get control of the federal budget deficit.

Under the president's proposal, lawmakers would have to scrap much of the farm law they passed in 2002 to realize the $8.2 billion in cuts Bush expects from farm subsidies over 10 years. The federal student loan program would need to be restructured to find $10.7 billion over the next decade.

Bush hopes major changes to Medicaid, the federal health plan for the poor, will shave $45 billion from the program through 2015. He is counting on significant changes to the federal program that ensures private-sector pensions for a 10-year savings of $31 billion. A proposal to consolidate and then cut 18 community development programs from five Cabinet agencies would need a legislative response as well as a reorganization of congressional jurisdictions.

Separate legislation would probably be needed to eliminate federal subsidies for Amtrak, and Bush is counting on leases from oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- but Congress, again, would have to oblige. And all of that would have to be enacted this year, as lawmakers debate the most broad revision of Social Security since the program's inception.

"That is a lot of apple to bake," said former representative Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.), a budget expert.

Beyond those changes, the president has proposed trimming domestic spending at Congress's annual discretion from $391 billion this year to $389 billion next year and then freezing it at that level for five consecutive years. White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten suggested there was a precedent for such a request in the 1990s, when Republicans first took control of Congress. But domestic spending declined in only one year of that decade: 1996. Indeed, since 1962, domestic spending has never held steady or declined for two years in a row, let alone five, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

"It is ambitious," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at the economic forecasting firm Economy.com. "And if history is any guide, it's not going to happen."

In the run-up to this budget release, international lenders, bond and currency traders and the leader of the International Monetary Fund publicly implored the president to produce a credible plan to lower the U.S. budget deficit.

"We put together all the budgets with an eye to the credibility and confidence that the United States government has," said Bolten, a former executive at the Wall Street investment firm Goldman Sachs. "I think this budget should continue to attract a lot of confidence in both domestic and international markets."

But many analysts doubt that Congress will fully embrace the president's recommendations, and the greetings from Wall Street economists yesterday were not encouraging.

"Clearly their deficit numbers are not credible -- haven't been for the last few years and they shouldn't be looked at with much seriousness now," said David Greenlaw, an economist and fiscal policy expert at Morgan Stanley.

Edward McKelvey, an economist at Goldman Sachs, noted that all presidential budgets ask a lot from Congress. But by resolutely standing by his tax cuts, Bush has put an unrealistic onus on Congress to focus narrowly on finding spending cuts, he said, concluding, "I don't think it's politically realistic."

Bush's budget contains nearly $1.2 trillion in tax reductions over 10 years, most of which are designed to make permanent his first-term tax cuts.

Already, Bush is facing significant headwind. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee and an influential member of the agriculture committee, declared he would never go along with the president's agriculture proposals, which he said unfairly target cotton and rice growers in the Southeast.

Congress passed the last major revision of the federal farm support system in 2002, after considerable contentious debate. Lawmakers are not about to reopen the issue before they have to, Cochran said.

"Frankly, I don't think anyone in the administration really thought Congress would go along with this," he said.

Similar resistance has emerged toward the administration's plan to consolidate community development programs at the departments of the Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Commerce all under the Commerce Department's roof.

To make that happen, Bush would have to win the consent of four appropriations subcommittees, as well as the Senate banking committee and the House Financial Services Committee. Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that funds HUD, said the proposal "makes no sense."

"We don't have a single government," he said. "We have a three-branch government. We are supposed to have some power of the purse up here."

The largest savings in the budget would come from Medicaid. The administration hopes to close loopholes that Bolten said are allowing state governments to gain more than their fair share in federal Medicaid matching grants, for a savings of $45 billion over 10 years.

"The Medicaid proposals do involve asking states to shoulder a more appropriate share of the burden," he said.

State governments have become adept at taking advantage of the system to boost their federal share of Medicaid spending, often using that federal money to finance government spending far afield from health care, said Medicaid expert James Frogue of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which represents state legislators.

But state governments -- many headed by Republican governors -- are already struggling with burgeoning Medicaid costs, and many will no doubt balk at the plan. Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) said states are not doing anything that is contrary to existing law. Both the federal government and the states need to work together to get control of Medicaid costs, he said.

It "would be very unfortunate if the administration tried to characterize the very rules HHS created and blessed" as states now gaming the system, said Warner, who is chairman of the National Governors Association.

What I find incomprehensible that despite the burgeoning deficit the governments {Bush's} reluctance to rescinding the recently enacted tax cuts for the wealthiest in the nation. Not only does he want not to rescind them he wants that they be made permanent. The truth is the government needs increased revenue to operate. Cutting a few social programs will be tantamount to a fart in the wind. Not only that in some instances it attacks the most needy among us. Is this is what is called compassionate conservatism?

Out of all the news I read today, this one is just heartbreaking and sad.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61079-2005Apr17.html?nav=hcmodule

Bush's 'Competitive Sourcing' Worries Disabled Workers
Initiative May Put Employees With Special Needs At a Decided Disadvantage, Their Advocates Say
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 18, 2005; Page A15


David Goodman, a clerk at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, is caught between two conflicting federal policies, one that helped him get his federal job 14 years ago and another that soon may take it away.

Goodman, 34, has autism, a developmental disability that affects the brain and impairs a person's social skills and reasoning. He landed his job in NIH's Occupational Health and Safety Division in 1991 as a "Schedule A" appointee, the beneficiary of long-standing government policies that promote the employment of people with disabilities in federal agencies.

"It's a nice job. I like the people that work there. They are nice to me," said Goodman, who works from 8 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. every weekday and lives independently in an apartment in Rockville.

Last month, his family learned that Goodman is among tens of thousands of federal employees, the vast majority of them not disabled, whose agencies are evaluating whether their jobs could be performed better and more cheaply by a private contractor. It is all part of President Bush's "competitive sourcing" initiative, which requires civil servants across the government to prove they can do their work more efficiently than private contractors, or risk seeing the work outsourced.

The initiative has thrown a scare into many federal workers, who are anxious about whether they will be forced to go to work for a private contractor or find themselves with no job at all. But the policy is especially vexing for employees with disabilities and their advocates. They fear that a strict economic comparison puts such workers at a decided disadvantage because they often require more supervision and extra help, and therefore cost more to employ.

Advocates say Bush's focus on the bottom line ignores the fact that for decades, through various policies and laws, federal agencies have gone out of their way to hire members of certain populations, from veterans to disabled people to welfare mothers and students. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, for instance, banned discrimination against disabled people in federal hiring and required agencies to develop plans to hire and promote more people with disabilities.

The competitive sourcing policy also flies in the face of more recent efforts under the Bush administration's New Freedom Initiative to promote opportunities for disabled people and better integrate them into the general workforce, the advocates say.

"I really think people with disabilities are getting the short end of the stick on this," said Susan G. Goodman, David Goodman's mother.

Timothy J. Wheeles, the federal manager in charge of competitive sourcing at NIH, said he agrees. The agency values the diversity of its workforce, he said, and many managers and colleagues are worried about what competitive sourcing will mean for employees such as Goodman.

Wheeles said he has tried -- unsuccessfully -- to find some loophole to safeguard Goodman's job and those of other workers with special needs. But nothing in Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76, the regulations that govern the job competitions, allows that, Wheeles said. And federal law requiring merit to be the governing principle in personnel matters prohibits giving disabled employees preferential treatment over other civil servants after they have been hired under special policies, he said.

"I personally have been looking at this issue for over a year," Wheeles said. "We looked to see, is there a rule, is there an option, is there some way to do this? And we were told, 'No.' . . . We've been talking with all the key players at all of the levels and trying to find a way that makes sense, that balances our need for a diverse workforce along with the need to meet the competitive sourcing requirements. And we haven't been able to do that."

David Safavian, the OMB official who oversees the competitive sourcing policy, said he could not comment on the specific circumstances of the NIH issue. But more broadly, "OMB takes the position that competitive sourcing managers should ensure that competitive sourcing plans take appropriate steps to provide meaningful job opportunities for people with disabilities. OMB believes that the goal of providing job opportunities to people with disabilities is consistent with our goal of improving program performance and decreasing costs for taxpayers."

"An agency might look at whether there are opportunities for relocation or retraining within the agency," Safavian said, or consider other options such as requiring a winning contractor to offer jobs to affected employees.

Goodman's duties at NIH include data entry, filing, photocopying documents, delivering mail and faxes and going out to get office supplies, his mother said. The job has helped him build relationships with co-workers and earn enough money to live independently. Some people with autism cannot function as well as Goodman has.

"Part of the success of this job has been his co-workers in his office, who have been with him for 14 years. For a person with autism, who he is with is as important as what he is doing," Susan Goodman said. "It's very, very hard for people with disabilities to get the support they need to stay employed full-time. It just doesn't happen that often."

Her son does not understand that his job may be in jeopardy, she said.

Goodman and three other employees with special needs are among the 18 full-time administrative support workers whose jobs are under review for possible takeover by a contractor, Wheeles said. In all, 340 full-time positions at NIH are slated for such reviews this year, including those of food service workers, employees who operate and repair medical equipment, and others who work in information technology. Six to eight of those jobs are held by workers with special needs, he said.

Federal workers have been fairly successful in the competitions. About 30,168 positions government-wide were evaluated for contracting out over the past two years, and the in-house team triumphed about 90 percent of the time, according to OMB figures.

Wheeles also noted that top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH's parent agency, have said that employees whose jobs are shifted to the private sector can get new training and another federal job within the department, so no one will be thrown out of work.

That is still not good enough, said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), whose district includes the NIH. Two years ago, he intervened in a similar dispute over a job competition involving 21 mentally retarded cafeteria workers at the National Naval Medical Center. The Navy suspended the competition indefinitely after Van Hollen inquired about it and after The Washington Post began working on an article.

Van Hollen introduced legislation April 5 that would prohibit federal agencies engaged in competitive sourcing from terminating or transferring employees who obtained their jobs through special federal hiring preferences for the disabled. (The prohibition would not apply if the federal jobs in question were being moved to qualified nonprofit organizations that work on behalf of the disabled.) Van Hollen unsuccessfully sponsored similar legislation last year, but he said he remains optimistic it will draw bipartisan support.

Competitive sourcing "totally undermines another very important objective of our federal policy, which is to provide job opportunities for people with disabilities," Van Hollen said. "These are individuals who have proven themselves in the current positions. They have got the support of their fellow employees and have developed working relationships that are very important to their success in these jobs. You can't just have these individuals bouncing around from one job to another."



© 2005 The Washington Post Company

What is a better use of your tax dollars? Nation building in Iraq or to the betterment of the people of the US. Our government apparently feels that the Iraqis have first call. Not happy, throw the bums out. It is time to tell our government that that charity begins at home.

Depends on who the Govt is serving. If it's the US people they have failed miserably, if it's transnational corporations with nominal American identity then it's - "Mission Accomplished".

For me this issue just hits too close to home as I know several people personally who work in our local opportunity center for the disabled. Even if I didn't it would still make my blood boil to talk about it.

Funny how issues like these don't fire up the passions that other more sensational issues fired up the passsions in the not too distant past.

Ironically, or not, money to the VA will be cut while defense spending will be increased. In other words the subsidy to the defense industry will be boosted while the common soldier suffers. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex.

Why blame the military industrial complex? Put the blame where it belongs. The creep in the white house, the bought and paid for congress and a Moronic electorate that put them there.

If he really wants to cut something worthwhile...I'd suggest one of his jugular veins.



Or perhaps both!

The military-industrial complex has its hand so far up Bush's butt, that he's nothing but a puppet.

coluber2001



And that is who's responsibility?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-04-28-gop-budget_x.htm




I hope everyone is enjoying the tax cuts.

45 million people without medical insurance is good enough reason for cuts in Medicaid. We don't want these people to sponge off the government do we. Maybe this will thin the herd?
Signed
I.M. Republican

Government, by the people and for the people. What a crock of crap.