board77

This site has an excellent analysis of the 1007 Bush Budget just sent to Congress this week. It is more of Robin Hood in reverse.



http://www.cbpp.org/2-6-06bud.htm

Here are a few key points

[quote]Is the Budget Fiscally Responsible?

The Administration’s budget would increase the deficit over both the short run and the long run. The budget proposes significant reductions in a broad array of domestic programs, but those reductions would not be used to reduce the deficit. Instead, they would be used to offset a fraction of the costs of the tax cuts the President proposes. Since the tax cuts and the defense and homeland security increases the President is proposing would cost substantially more than his domestic program cuts would save, the net effect of the new budget would be to make deficits larger than they otherwise would be.

The budget would reduce expenditures by $187 billion over five years through cuts in non-defense programs (i.e., domestic and international programs) outside homeland security. This includes reductions in both discretionary (i.e., annually appropriated) programs and entitlement programs.
However, the budget proposes $285 billion in tax cuts over the same period, and $1.7 trillion in tax cuts over ten years. (Note: these figures significantly understate the cost of the tax cuts, because the budget fails to include the cost of continuing to provide relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax after 2006.)
The budget also includes a $79 billion increase over five years in defense and homeland-security spending. (This does not include the additional expenditures expected from the supplemental appropriations the budget requests for 2006 and 2007 for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
As a result, the Administration’s own numbers indicate that the President’s budget proposals would increase deficits by $192 billion over the next five years, compared to what deficits would be if current laws and policies remained unchanged.[1] Indeed, data contained in Administration budget materials show that deficits would total $760 billion over the next five years without the policy changes the Administration is proposing, but would total $952 billion with those policy changes.
A standard part of the President’s budget each year is a summary table that shows the impact of the Administration’s proposed policies on the deficit. (See Table S-12 on page 364 of last year’s budget.) This year, however, the Administration has eliminated that table from its budget publications, presumably to deflect attention from the deficit-increasing impact of its proposals. (The impact of the budget’s proposals on the deficit can be constructed from data in the budget and accompanying Administration budget information, which is what we have done.)

The budget would cause even larger increases in deficits outside the five-year budget window. The budget fails to provide numbers for revenues, expenditures, and deficits for years after fiscal year 2011, an omission that masks the budget’s large effects in swelling long-term deficits. The Administration proposes to make its tax cuts permanent. Since most of the current tax cuts are in effect through 2010, the overwhelming bulk of the cost of making the tax cuts permanent would occur outside the five-year budget period.

The sole year that the budget covers in which a large share of the annual costs of making the tax cuts permanent is evident is 2011. Data in the budget show that in that year, the budget’s proposals would cause the deficit to be $116 billion higher than would otherwise be the case.
Moreover, if relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax is continued, as it surely will be, the effect of the Administration’s policies on the budget in 2011 would be to increase the deficit by another $95 billion, for a total of about $210 billion that year.
Even these figures for 2011 significantly understate the long-term effect the President’s budget would have in swelling the deficit. Several of the additional tax cuts the Administration is proposing — including costly proposals related to health savings accounts and to retirement and lifetime savings accounts — are designed such that their costs in the first five or ten years would be substantially smaller than their costs in subsequent decades, when they would lose huge amounts of revenue. The budget shows the Administration’s Health Savings Accounts proposals would cost a whopping $156 billion over the first ten years, but the costs would be even higher in subsequent ten-year periods. In addition, past analyses by the Congressional Research Service have estimated that the Administration’s retirement and lifetime savings account proposals would ultimately cost $300 billion to $500 billion per decade (measured in today’s dollars).

In short, the budget would make the nation’s looming long-term budget problems even more serious than they already are and continue to “dig the hole deeper.â€

The 1007 Bush Budget....yikes.

Once upon a time there was a myth that Republicans had small government tendencies. The last several years have shown it to be false.

Yes, it sucks.

Hal
as a sometimes supporter of the President, could you be more specific in what you do not like about the budget? I would find that most interesting.

Thanks.

I alluded to this in another thread, but is he serious? Or is he just setting Democratic Congressmen up for "he voted not to support the troops" campaign ads this fall?

Didn't Bush promise to cut the deficit in his re-election campaign?

Not surprising that a politician lied in his campaign, but I want to point it out.

Good lord all politicians lie!!! It's like the one thing they all have in common!

SF, they're masking spending more on meaningless crap, or whatever it is they call extra spending these days... and trying to mask it with defense spending.

It could be like Dave said, with a campaign talking point, but I think it's more likely it's just bad spending.

I'm all for spendign what it takes on defense, but you have to cut other stuff to do it. There's more than plenty that could be cut.

Hal
thank your for your explaination. If you look at these figures, I think you will see that Bush is doing much of what you say you would like.

The budget would reduce expenditures by $187 billion over five years through cuts in non-defense programs (i.e., domestic and international programs) outside homeland security. This includes reductions in both discretionary (i.e., annually appropriated) programs and entitlement programs.
However, the budget proposes $285 billion in tax cuts over the same period, and $1.7 trillion in tax cuts over ten years. (Note: these figures significantly understate the cost of the tax cuts, because the budget fails to include the cost of continuing to provide relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax after 2006.)
The budget also includes a $79 billion increase over five years in defense and homeland-security spending. (This does not include the additional expenditures expected from the supplemental appropriations the budget requests for 2006 and 2007 for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

So they are cutting domestic spending, raising defense spending and cutting revenues by cutting taxes upon the highest earners. The result is the predictable increase in the deficit.

There are only two sides to every budget: Income and Expenditures. And the scary thing is that there is a bunch of stuff that is not even on the budget and will spend billions more. This is bad news for all of us.

By the way, did everybody know that part of the domestic cuts is to end the $255 Social Security death benefit?
Cut taxes on the rich but take away a pittance from average folks.

they're lumping homeland security into defense, are they not? I don't think that's a good thing. Homeland security is being used as a blanket term for a lot of things.

Yes, some of what it says they're doing is fine. I still think they're wasting far too much money. There is no reason to have a deficit, I don't care how much you want to spend on defense, or how much you want to cut taxes.

It's plain they don't care to have a balenced budget, which frankly, disturbs me.