Bloated Bush budget.

ITEM: White House Press Spokesman Scott McClellan made the following statement on February 7, after the president unveiled his fiscal 2006 budget: "I think if you look at the budget, it shows that we are exercising even greater spending restraint than we have in the previous few years. This is a responsible budget that funds our nation's highest priorities and keeps us on track to cut the deficit in half over the next five years."

ITEM: The lead sentence of a front-page story in the February 8 Boston Globe charged that "President Bush yesterday laid out a $2.6 trillion federal budget that would boost national defense while making the deepest cuts in social programs since the Reagan administration."

ITEM: A house editorial in the February 8 New York Times on the fiscal 2006 federal budget asserted: "The deficit problem is a reflection of lowered revenue more than high spending--a fact that the president and the Republicans in Congress are determined to ignore."

CORRECTION: All of the above statements are both patently false and deliberately deceptive. White House Spokesman Scott McClellan claimed that the Bush administration is "committed to deficit reduction" in his February 7 press conference after the release of the fiscal 2006 budget proposal to Congress. The Bush budget does show the deficit being reduced from an estimated $427 billion this year to $390 billion next year. However, the president's budget does not include his request for $82 billion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2006. If the $82 billion were included, the projected deficit for 2006 would be $472 billion, a record high.

A reporter, taking into account the war costs, pointedly asked McClellan: "So if you can just illuminate for us, if you're doing such a great job at restraining spending, why is the deficit projection higher for next year than it was for this year?" McClellan replied:

   Well you have to go back and look
   at what we've been through over the
   last few years.... I can go through
   that again, but I think you've heard it,
   everything that we've been through.
   And we're in a time of war. You must
   remember that, as well. And there
   are important challenges that we
   have an obligation to meet, first and
   foremost, to protect the American
   people, to defend the homeland from
   attack and to make sure we win the
   war on terrorism. That is our nation's
   highest priority.

But wartime does not explain the proposed spending increase in President Bush's new budget (from $2.48 trillion in fiscal 2005 to $2.57 trillion in 2006) since, as already indicated, the administration did not include war costs for the coming fiscal year. Nor does boosting national defense explain the increase, since the president's budget, contrary to the Boston Globe story quoted above, shows Defense Department spending falling from $444 billion in fiscal 2005 to $426 billion in 2006. Also, over the past few Bush budgets, promised deficit cuts have disappeared, replaced by increasingly higher deficits, including the largest deficit on record to date ($412 billion in 2004).

The New York Times falsely blamed the "deficit problem" on President Bush's tax cuts, but the truth is that the Bush budget estimates that the federal government will take in $2.05 trillion this fiscal year, a record high. And in 2006 it will take in $2.18 trillion, a 6 percent increase. The growing deficits are not the result of declining revenues but of increased spending.

The purpose of the Boston Globe's assertion that President Bush would make "the deepest cuts in social programs since the Reagan administration" was to paint Bush as a stingy conservative hostile to the poor and working classes. In reality, the Bush budget would increase social spending overall by 5.5 percent, from $1.588 trillion to $1.676 trillion. Regarding Education Department spending specifically, which the Bush budget supposedly slashes, spending would drop from $71.0 billion in fiscal 2005 to $64.3 billion in 2006. Not mentioned in media accounts, however, is that fact that this budget was much smaller when Bush became president ($35.7 billion in 2001).

By way of comparison, spending on social programs overall rose an average of 5.5 percent per year during the eight years of the Clinton administration but has risen an average of 8.0 percent per year during the Bush administration to date. From a fiscal standpoint, the figures demonstrate that the federal government is actually more liberal and fiscally irresponsible during the Bush administration that it was when Bill Clinton was in office.