Democrats Pledge to Restrain Spending

Critics Say Party's Goals Are Too Lofty

By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post

Determined to banish their old tax-and-spend image, Democrats want to shrink the federal deficit, preserve tax cuts for the middle class and challenge the president to raise money for the Iraq war when they take control of Congress next week. But it won't be easy.

The incoming Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Budget committees said they plan to honor a campaign promise to devote billions of additional dollars a year to homeland security and education. And they reiterated a commitment not to cut off funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But with the costs of those military operations rising and President Bush considering an expansion of forces, the incoming chairmen, Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.) and Sen. Kent Conrad (N.D.), said they will have little room in their budget blueprints for significant new domestic spending, such as closing a much-criticized gap in the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit that forces millions of seniors to pay 100 percent of drug costs for a few weeks or months each year.

They said they will press Bush to help finance a war that is costing the nation as much as $8 billion a month.

"Raising taxes would certainly be an option," Conrad said in an interview. "The president, this is his policy. He's got an obligation to pay for it."

The two chairmen said they would seek to save money by demanding a better accounting of military spending and an end to "the ever-expanding 'shadow budget' of supplemental and bridge funds," as they put it in a letter to the White House last week that was also signed by outgoing Senate Budget Committee chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.). Those budget mechanisms have funneled more than $500 billion to terror-related operations since Sept. 11, 2001, with little scrutiny from the Republican lawmakers who are leaving power. Spratt said he would spend most of January in oversight hearings to determine where the money is going.

"When the president talks about staying the course, he never mentions cost as a factor," Spratt said. "But it is a factor, particularly when you get costs over $100 billion a year."

(The rest is here.)