Nobody Seems to Like Bush’s Priorities

By Douglas Turner

Rob Portman, President Bush’s budget director, said Monday that the president heard the November election results “loud and clear” and wanted to remove any confusion in his proposed budget over spending provisions for the war in Iraq.

Unfortunately, the proposed budget for Iraq that Bush released Monday seems to have made virtually nobody happy — not on the right; not on the left.

The conservative Taxpayers for Common Sense denounced it for “gimmicks and wishful thinking.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who heads the new Democratic majority in the House, attacked the president’s military budget outline from the opposite direction.

Pelosi noted that Bush signaled he wants to spend $142 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2008 fiscal year starting Oct. 1, a third more than is budgeted for the current year. His fiscal plan, she said, offers “no hope” that the United States will be out of Iraq soon.

Just a year ago, the White House said it would propose a $50 billion supplemental appropriation for fiscal 2007 for the two wars.

That figure has ballooned into $90 billion for the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to numbers released Monday.

Even so, the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, saw an opportunity to balance the budget overall in view of what it said is Bush’s willingness to budget any money for the two wars in fiscal 2009, which starts Oct. 1, 2008.

Those 2009 projections should not be taken that seriously, Portman said. He told reporters Monday that the Bush administration has made what he termed a $50 billion “allowance” for war costs for fiscal 2009, which starts Oct. 1, 2008.

Portman, a former Ohio congressman, described the $50 billion provision for special war funding for fiscal 2009 as a kind of “place-holder — an arbitrary figure for whatever might come.”

“We really don’t know what the costs will be,” Portman said in a White House briefing.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the lower cost figure for 2008 should not be interpreted as an indication that the Bush administration expects to begin a major troop reduction in Iraq this year.

War aside, Bush’s is claiming a major achievement in that under his plan, the deficit would be eliminated by the end of 2012, or at the end of his successor’s first term.

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

But Robert Greenstein, head of the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the president’s plan to make his tax cuts permanent will cost the government $3.5 trillion over five years.

And the Concord Coalition took issue with Bush’ deficit- reduction numbers.

“Tax cuts remain the main priority in the budget,” the coalition said. “The revenue loss from the president’s tax proposals, including extension of expiring tax cuts over five years [$599 billion] is more than 10 times the proposed savings from mandatory spending [$46 billion] from reductions in nonsecurity discretionary spending.”

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., normally an ally of the Bush administration on national security issues, attacked the president’s homeland security budget.

“For the fourth year in a row,” Lieberman said, Bush’s proposals “will undercut crucial support for the men and women on the front lines of the domestic war on terrorism and endanger the ability of first-responders to prepare themselves adequately for predictable disasters.”

And freshman Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, warned that Bush has carelessly underfunded veterans’ needs.

“The budget requests approximately $34.2 billion for veterans’ health care, a 6 percent increase over the 2007 funding level of $32.3 billion,” Brown said.

“The VA has testified in the past that the Veterans Health Administration requires a minimum annual increase of 13 to 14 percent to meet the rising costs from medical inflation and increasing demand.”

e-mail: dturner@buffnews.com

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