Dems turn to Bush-style budget tricks
By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press
Democrats are using the same tricks as President Bush in their rival plan to balance the federal budget by 2012: ignoring long-term costs of the war in Iraq and the need to fix a tax law that threatens unsuspecting middle-class families.
Bush used phantom savings to claim he can balance the budget while extending his tax cuts into the future. Democrats would use that money to increase spending on education, health research and other domestic programs while claiming to be budget balancers.
"They say they balance, but they do it by leaving out things," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (news, bio, voting record) said on PBS' "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" when Bush's budget came out Feb. 5. "They leave out fixing the alternative minimum tax. They leave out realistic war cost."
Bush's one-year stopgap fix to the alternative minimum tax, or AMT, "will be felt by people as a huge tax increase" later on, Conrad, D-N.D., said later.
The same could be said of his own plan that arrived Tuesday on the Senate floor. It has only a two-year fix to the AMT.
Then there's the war in Iraq. After proposing $145 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan for next year, Bush's budget proposes just $50 billion for 2009 and none at all after that.
(Continued here.)
Associated Press
Democrats are using the same tricks as President Bush in their rival plan to balance the federal budget by 2012: ignoring long-term costs of the war in Iraq and the need to fix a tax law that threatens unsuspecting middle-class families.
Bush used phantom savings to claim he can balance the budget while extending his tax cuts into the future. Democrats would use that money to increase spending on education, health research and other domestic programs while claiming to be budget balancers.
"They say they balance, but they do it by leaving out things," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (news, bio, voting record) said on PBS' "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" when Bush's budget came out Feb. 5. "They leave out fixing the alternative minimum tax. They leave out realistic war cost."
Bush's one-year stopgap fix to the alternative minimum tax, or AMT, "will be felt by people as a huge tax increase" later on, Conrad, D-N.D., said later.
The same could be said of his own plan that arrived Tuesday on the Senate floor. It has only a two-year fix to the AMT.
Then there's the war in Iraq. After proposing $145 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan for next year, Bush's budget proposes just $50 billion for 2009 and none at all after that.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
Conrad got some good ideas … too bad he’s found out that the Republicans have ran the deficit to such an extent that his own words are hurting him. Republicans Bunning and Gregg are pushing an amendment to the stop raiding the Social Security funds to pay for current spending. The amendment was originally authored by Conrad in 2002, but now with the deficit so far out of control, that would be imprudent. Conrad says that he will support the amendment … so that the White House will be forced to consider reigning in spending in future years. Somehow, the Pay-Go rules must be implemented and enforced.
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