[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 31 (Tuesday, February 26, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E237-E238]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, February 26, 2008

  Mr. RANGEL. Madam Speaker, I rise today to express my concern over 
President Bush's handling of the budget and to enter into the Record 
editorials from today's Washington Post, ``Budget Mess--President 
Bush's last spending plan only adds to a disastrous fiscal legacy'' and 
from today's New York Times, ``Lame-Duck Budget.''
  President Bush was given a gift 7 years ago; the gift was a projected 
surplus of $5.6 trillion over the next decade. He has been neither 
appreciative nor responsible with this gift that America entrusted him 
with to make the lives of all Americans better. Instead his policies 
have benefited select groups and special interest. Case in point, his 
tax cutting agenda has greatly improved the lives of households with 
incomes totaling more than $450,000 a year. These are some of the 
wealthiest American households.
  The national debt has grown by $2 trillion and the projected $725 
billion surplus for the upcoming fiscal year (2009) has disappeared and 
in its place has appeared a $407 billion deficit. Based on Mr. Bush's 
recent budget submission, he proposes to pay for additional tax cuts 
through $397 billion deficit spending over the next 5 years.
  Mr. Bush leaves behind a legacy of failed fiscal policies and 
priorities. Mr. Bush stated his budget plan would put the country on 
the road to balancing the budget by 2012. However, he mistakenly forgot 
to inform the American people that his plan only partially funds the 
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2009, and starting in 2010, he has 
planned zero spending. This is a disingenuous attempt to make his 
budget plan seem plausible.
  There are no winners with the Bush budget proposal; domestic spending 
programs will be cut or remain flat. There is no long-term planning for 
the alternative minimum tax and both Medicare and health care spending 
will suffer devastating cuts.
  Given the uncertain economic future of the country Mr. Bush's budget 
proposal leaves his successor with a very difficult task ahead. This is 
especially disheartening since his predecessor left him with a surplus.

                [From the Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2008]

                              Budget Mess

       Seven long years ago, a new president submitted his first 
     budget--an optimistic document now relevant only as a 
     chastening artifact of a bygone era. In that ``Blueprint for 
     New Beginnings,'' George W. Bush grappled with the supposed 
     challenge of dealing with a projected surplus of $5.6 
     trillion over the next decade. The president proposed to pay 
     down the debt by $2 trillion during that time, which, he 
     said, was as much as could be responsibly redeemed. He 
     offered lavish tax cuts. And he vowed to ``confront great 
     challenges from which Government has too long flinched,'' 
     putting Social Security and Medicare on solid financial 
     footing.
       The final budget of Mr. Bush's presidency arrived 
     yesterday, and the contrast between then and now could hardly 
     be more sobering. Instead of being paid down, the national 
     debt has grown by $2 trillion. The $725 billion surplus once 
     projected for the coming fiscal year (2009) has evaporated. 
     In its place is a $407 billion deficit--an unrealistically 
     rosy number that omits billions in likely war spending and is 
     artificially reduced by including the $200 billion Social 
     Security surplus. The explosion in entitlement costs has been 
     left unaddressed and is therefore even more daunting. Indeed, 
     on entitlements, Mr. Bush's legacy will be to have added to 
     the long-term tab with the addition of an expensive Medicare 
     prescription drug benefit.
       Some of this transformation, as the administration would be 
     the first to point out, is not Mr. Bush's fault. Even as he 
     submitted that initial budget, the economy was slowing. The 
     attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, further rattled the economy and 
     imposed huge unanticipated costs for homeland security and 
     military operations overseas. Mr. Bush tried to launch the 
     necessary debate on Social Security, and, although the 
     president can be faulted for having poisoned the well with a 
     relentlessly partisan legislative strategy, congressional 
     Democrats chose to respond with more partisanship.
       But the fact remains that the purported surplus on which 
     Mr. Bush based his tax-cutting agenda was always something of 
     a mirage, and the president has never been willing to adjust 
     his agenda to the grim new fiscal reality. Yesterday's 
     promise of a small surplus by 2012 is once again premised on 
     omitting likely costs (zero is budgeted for operations in 
     Iraq and Afghanistan) and by assuming cuts to domestic 
     spending that are unachievable politically and, in large 
     part, unwise as a matter of policy.
       As always, Mr. Bush pledges to press ahead with his tax-
     cutting agenda: another $2.4 trillion over the next decade, 
     $3.7 trillion if relief from the alternative minimum tax is 
     included. The President argues that failing to extend his 
     previous tax cuts would result in an average tax increase of 
     $1,800. But Mr. Bush neglects to point out that the 
     overwhelming share of the tax cuts go to the wealthiest 
     Americans. The top 1 percent of households--those with 
     incomes of more than $450,000--would get 31 percent of the 
     benefits, with tax cuts averaging $67,000 by 2012. And Mr. 
     Bush does not even propose fully paying for these cuts: The 
     budget he submitted yesterday envisions another $397 billion 
     in deficit spending over the next five years because it would 
     devote more money to tax cuts than it would cut in spending.
       Mr. Bush inherited a potential windfall--and squandered it. 
     The next president will inherit his mess.
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, Feb. 5, 2008]

                            Lame-Duck Budget

       President Bush's 2009 budget is a grim guided tour through 
     his misplaced priorities, failed fiscal policies and the 
     disastrous legacy that he will leave for the next president. 
     And even that requires you to accept the White House's 
     optimistic accounting, which seven years of experience tells 
     us would be foolish in the extreme.
       With Mr. Bush on his way out the door and the Democrats in 
     charge of Congress, it is not clear how many of the 
     president's priorities, unveiled on Monday, will survive. 
     Among its many wrong-headed ideas, the budget includes some 
     $2 billion to ratchet up enforcement-heavy immigration 
     policies and billions more for a defense against ballistic 
     missiles that show no signs of working.
       What will definitely outlast Mr. Bush for years to come are 
     big deficits, a military so battered by the Iraq war that it 
     will take hundreds of billions of dollars to repair it and 
     stunted social programs that have been squeezed to pay for 
     Mr. Bush's misguided military adventure and his misguided tax 
     cuts for the wealthy.
       The president claimed on Monday that his plan would put the 
     country on the path to balancing the budget by 2012. That is 
     nonsense. His own proposal projects a $410 billion deficit 
     for 2008 and a $407 billion deficit next year. Even more 
     disingenuous, Mr. Bush's projection for a balanced budget in 
     2012 assumes only partial funding for the wars in Iraq and 
     Afghanistan for 2009, and no such spending--zero--starting in 
     2010.
       It also assumes that there will be no long-running relief 
     from the alternative minimum tax--which would be ruinous for 
     the middle class--and that there will be deep cuts in 
     Medicare and other health care spending that have proved to 
     be politically impossible to enact.
       Mr. Bush, of course, inherited a surplus from the Clinton 
     administration, which he quickly used up on his tax cuts. He 
     then continued cutting taxes after the surpluses were gone 
     and even after launching the war in Iraq--$600 billion and 
     counting. Mr. Bush remains unrepentant. Even now, with the 
     economy--and revenues--slowing, he is pushing to make those 
     tax cuts permanent. That would be fiscally catastrophic.
       The big winner, predictably, is the Pentagon. After 
     adjusting for inflation, the proposed defense budget of 
     $515.4 billion--which

[[Page E238]]

     does not include either war spending or the cost of nuclear 
     weapons--would be up by more than 30 percent since Mr. Bush 
     took office and would be the highest level of military 
     spending since World War II.
       Mr. Bush's war of choice in Iraq, on top of the war of 
     necessity in Afghanistan, has seriously strained the American 
     military--its people and its equipment. Even a new president 
     committed to a swift withdrawal of American troops from Iraq 
     will have to keep asking for large Pentagon budgets, both to 
     repair that damage and to prepare the country to face what 
     will continue to be a very dangerous world.
       What is so infuriating about this budget is there is not 
     even a hint of the need for real trade-offs. As far as anyone 
     can tell, not a single weapons system would be canceled. That 
     means it will be up to Congress--also far too captive to 
     military-industry lobbyists--to start scaling back or 
     canceling expensive programs that don't meet today's threats, 
     or tomorrow's.
       There is one place we're delighted to see Mr. Bush invest 
     more money: a proposal to hire 1,100 new diplomats. The next 
     president will need all of the diplomatic help he or she can 
     get to contain the many international disasters Mr. Bush will 
     leave behind.
       Predictably, the big losers in Mr. Bush's budget are 
     domestic-spending programs--including medical research, 
     environmental protection and education--which will either be 
     held flat or cut.
       Even more predictably, most of Mr. Bush's touted savings 
     would come from programs intended to protect the country's 
     most vulnerable citizens: the elderly, the poor and the 
     disabled. The budget would sharply restrain the growth of 
     spending on the huge Medicare health insurance program, in an 
     effort to save some $178 billion over the next five years. 
     The administration would achieve that primarily by cutting 
     the annual increases in payments to hospitals, nursing homes 
     and other health care providers that are designed to keep up 
     with the rising costs of caring for Medicare beneficiaries.
       There is clearly room to restrain the rate of growth in 
     some of these payments. But the size and duration of the cuts 
     are irresponsible. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush--who insists that 
     every answer to the country's health care woes can be found 
     in the private sector--has left largely untouched the big 
     subsidies that prop up the private Medicare Advantage 
     insurance plans. Eliminating these unjustified subsidies 
     could save Medicare more than $5o billion over five years and 
     $150 billion over 10 years.
       Just as the nation seems on the edge of a recession, the 
     budget would also shave federal contributions to state 
     Medicaid programs by some $17 billion over five years. That 
     is exactly the wrong direction to go in tough economic times, 
     when low-income workers who lose their jobs need Medicaid 
     coverage and states have fewer funds to supply it.
       All of this means that Mr. Bush will leave his successor a 
     daunting list of problems: the ever-rising cost of health 
     care, the tens of millions of uninsured, a military that is 
     desperately in need of rebuilding. Thanks to Mr. Bush's 
     profligate ways, it also means that the next president will 
     have even less money for solving them.

                          ____________________