by Mike Hall, Feb 6, 2007

So much for President Bush’s plea to Congress to work together in a spirit of bipartisanship and find common ground to address the nation’s needs.

Bush’s fiscal year 2008 budget proposal—like his previous fiscal blueprints—is loaded with expensive, permanent tax cuts aimed at the wealthy while it knifes away money for children’s health care, Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for low-income families, job training for displaced workers, training and equipment for first responders, low-income heating subsidies and other vital domestic programs.

But, unlike Bush’s past budgets, this one faces Democrat majorities in the House and Senate. Says Sen. Kent Conrad (D- N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee:

The president’s budget is filled with debt and deception, disconnected from reality, and continues to move America in the wrong direction. This administration has the worst fiscal record in history and this budget does nothing to change that. It clings to the same misguided policies: costly tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthiest, cuts in domestic priorities and more fiscal irresponsibility.

The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) refutes the Bush balanced budget claims:

The president argues that his budget is fiscally responsible, trumpeting the claim that it reaches balance in 2012. But the budget would be balanced only on paper, omitting well over $100 billion in costs for that year.

Whether the budget is balanced in 2012 does not hold great significance because the big fiscal challenge is the severe long-term deficits that will emerge in the decades after 2012. Indeed, in the fine print of the budget, the administration acknowledges that deficits will shoot up not many years after 2012. The president’s budget would make these long-term deficits even larger.

Along with the budget cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy, the Bush budget continues to pursue Bush’s Social Security privatization that has been soundly rejected by the public and Congress during the past few years.

The budget included plans to divert a portion of Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts. In the $2.9 trillion budget, Bush calls for nearly $80 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, along with plans to force seniors to pay more for their Medicare Part B (doctor’s visits) premiums and larger portions of their prescription drug premiums under Medicare Part D. Bush’s proposed new eligibility rules for coverage under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) will prevent hundreds of thousands of low-income children from receiving health care under the program. If those rules were in effect today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimates some 350,000 children would not be eligible for coverage.On the jobs front, Bush cuts more than $1 billion in job training and employment programs, just a week after he talked about the need for better training and assistance to help America’s workers compete in a global economy. The Bush budget eliminates current job training for unemployed adults and at-risk youths and funnels that money into block grants for unproven so-called Career Advancement Accounts that the previous Republican-controlled Congress rejected several times.

Bush also wants to cut some $77 million in Trade Adjustment Assistance, which provides income support and training for workers who lose their jobs due to trade. But the cuts follow Bush’s effort to extend his Fast Track trade authority to win the kind of trade agreements that have already cost millions of U.S. workers their jobs.

The budget also calls for $1.2 billion in cuts for Homeland Security grants and training programs, including a 55 percent reduction in grant money for firefighters—from $662 million to $300 million.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program that helps several million poor families and the elderly and disabled to afford to heat their homes in the winter, faces a 19 percent or $420 million cut under the Bush budget plan.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says:

The newly-released Bush budget for fiscal year 2008 shows that this administration still isn’t listening to working Americans and, instead, insists on plowing ahead with skewed priorities and misguided policies despite a clear call for a new direction in November’s elections.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) notes that since Bush took office with a huge federal budget surplus, he’s turned the surplus into “a mountain of debt” and now claims his budget plan will balance the budget by 2012.

Read the CBPP full budget analysis here, Isaiah J. Poole’s take on TomPaine.com here and click here for Alec Dubro’s post about how the Bush budget undermines workers.

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