Bush’s Budget Beefs Up Defense: White House Predicts a Surplus By 2012

By Mark Silva, Chicago Tribune

Feb. 6–WASHINGTON — President Bush, seeking $245 billion more for the nation’s two wars at a time when Congress is challenging an escalation of U.S. military force in Iraq, proposed a $2.9 trillion federal budget Monday that would significantly increase defense spending while restraining other areas of the government.

The president’s plan for 2008 is much like the budgets he has presented for the past six years, averting new taxes and limiting spending in many “discretionary” areas while boosting defense spending. The $481.4 billion requested for the Department of Defense would mark a 62 percent boost since Bush took office and an 11 percent increase over the current budget.

What is different is the political environment in which the president is delivering his newest spending plan. Leaders of the new Democratic-controlled Congress are challenging not only the president’s escalation of force in Iraq but also his conduct of the war in general.

The White House, while insisting that its commitment to military force in Iraq is not open-ended, added a $50 billion “placeholder” proposal for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2009 budget year, a fiscal acknowledgement that the conflicts will outlast Bush’s tenure.

“Our priority is to protect the American people,” Bush said Monday. “And our priority is to make sure our troops have what it takes to do their jobs.”

The president’s newest spending plan arrives as the Senate is working to craft a non-binding resolution protesting Bush’s deployment of 21,500 additional troops in Iraq, which accounts for $5.6 billion of the $100 billion in added war costs for 2007 that the president is seeking. The White House says it has not factored that deployment into the war costs of the 2008 budget, because this “surge” of troops is expected to be temporary.

That resolution hit a Republican roadblock Monday when GOP leaders found the votes to halt debate on the measure. Republicans want their own resolutions considered at the same time as the Democratic-supported measure.

Congressional leaders–insisting they support the military, especially the troops already in Iraq–promised closer scrutiny of the president’s war spending than the Republican-run Congress has given defense expenditures since 2002.

“The sums involved in the defense budget requests are staggering,” said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. At the same time, Bush is seeking a 92,000-person increase in the size of the standing military.

Skelton said the military has “long needed an increase in funding.”

“We cannot provide an adequate national defense on the cheap, but neither can we afford to simply ratify the president’s request,” he added. “Congress must look very carefully at how much of this increase truly goes to enhancing our readiness and future defense capabilities and how much is being spent to further the fight in Iraq.”

Projected war cost: $700 billion

The White House insisted that it has attempted to make the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as “transparent” as possible by spelling them out in its new budget. This comes after four years in which the White House has sent the Congress “emergency” supplemental funding plans for the wars, separate from the main budget.

The newest increase of $100 billion in war spending for the current year would push to $170 billion the wars’ costs during the 2007 budget year that ends Sept. 30. The president’s budget director said military planners have taken their best guess in estimating a $145 billion war budget for 2008.

Overall, the president’s requests push the projected costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to nearly $700 billion through 2008, just before Bush will finish his term.

“It’s a credible and more transparent budget,” said Rob Portman, Bush’s budget director, maintaining that this blueprint “goes further than we have in the past to show the full cost of the war . . . for the rest of the president’s term.”

That is not all that Bush is promising by the end of his presidency and beyond. After the federal budget deficit jumped to record highs during the Bush administration, the White House promises to halve that deficit by the end of his presidency. The administration also maintains that the proposed budget would put the government on a path toward a slight surplus by 2012.

The deficit exceeded $400 billion during Bush’s first term, and the White House budget office now projects a deficit of $239 billion in 2008 and $187 billion in 2009. That could put the government on track for a $61 billion surplus by 2012, the budget office maintained.

Bush maintained that balancing the budget would be possible without raising taxes.

“I strongly believe Congress needs to listen to a budget which has no tax increase, and a budget, because of fiscal discipline, that can be balanced in five years,” Bush said at a Cabinet meeting Monday.

At the same time, the White House insisted that the spiraling increase in spending in entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid must be curtailed, and proposed $96 billion in spending cuts over the next five years to contain the growth of those programs.

Such mandatory spending now accounts for 53 percent of the overall federal budget, said Portman, noting that the share of entitlement programs in the budget has grown from 26 percent in the early 1960s. At the pace those programs have been growing, Portman says, they will “crowd out all other spending . . . unless we are ready to make the necessary reforms.”

Education spending reduced

The president’s 2008 plan includes close to 7 percent in additional spending for those mandatory programs, a 6 percent increase overall for “security”–including the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security–and just a 1 percent increase for all “discretionary” spending outside of the mandatory entitlements or security spending.

In some areas, such as education, the president is proposing a continuation of cutbacks. The 2008 plan proposes $58.6 billion for education, down from $68 billion this year. In 2006, $93 billion was spent on education.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) sharply criticized the proposal. Kennedy helped Bush win passage of his No Child Left Behind educational reforms during Bush’s first year as president, but has since criticized the administration for failing to finance those reforms.

“I am particularly disappointed that the president has once again proposed inadequate funding for the law’s important reforms and that he pays for his modest increases through cuts to other education programs,” Kennedy said.

The president is calling on Congress, as he has before, to shrink or eliminate 141 government programs to save another $12 billion.

But Portman, a former Ohio congressman, said the White House has adjusted its budget proposals to more closely conform to what Congress actually has done in recent years–which has meant increasing the discretionary areas of spending in the federal budget by about 1 percent this year.

mdsilva@tribune.com

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Copyright (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune

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