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Personal Social Security accounts to again be part of Bush's budget
January 31st 12:09:10 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) President Bush will renew his call for personal accounts
within Social Security and ask Congress to renew tax cuts and curb the
growth in benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid in his 2007 budget
request next week, according to administration officials.
But since election years hardly ever generate results on the budget or
attempts to cut the deficit, Bush is far more likely to find success in
smaller-bore initiatives like freezing the operating budgets of most
domestic Cabinet departments.
Bush's call last year to let younger workers divert some of their Social
Security taxes into private accounts never got off the ground with
lawmakers despite an election-style campaign by the administration and
its supporters. While the idea will again be in his proposed 2007
budget, the White House doesn't expect it to get even a nod this year
from Congress, a senior White House official said Monday, speaking on
condition of anonymity.
At the same time, the rising budget deficit and the enormous cost of the
war in Iraq may squeeze out upcoming Bush initiatives to boost access to
medical care among the very few items in his budget that the White House
has trumpeted in advance.
Bush's market-based health care initiative includes creating health
savings accounts, making out-of-pocket medical costs deductible, and
allowing small businesses to pool the purchasing of health insurance
across state lines free of state regulation.
Few of these initiatives are new; neither are Bush's demands for
permanent extension of his 2001 and 2003 tax cut bills and many other
items in his budget.
``It's all, for the most part, replays of the same things that they've
proposed for the past five years,'' said lobbyist Hazen Marshall, former
GOP staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. ``They seem to be
making a concerted effort to highlight health care, but the proposals
that I've seen haven't been anything new.''
And the simple fact that something is proposed again and again means
it's been rejected many times before. That's why many lawmakers will
consider much of Bush's budget plan ``dead on arrival.''
``The president's budget is not the agenda-setting development or event
that it used to be,'' said Stan Collender, managing director of
Financial Dynamics, a business communications firm. ``They use it to
make a political statement. It should in no way be taken as what they
would actually do or what they actually want or what they're ultimately
going to accept.''
Bush predicts the deficit for the current year will top $400 billion;
last year's deficit registered $319 billion. Bush says his budget plan
will meet his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his
presidency to $260 billion from a preliminary estimate of $521 billion
for the 2004 budget year.
Bush said Jan. 26 that his budget ``will continue to eliminate programs
that don't work or that are duplicative in nature, ... cut our deficit
in half by 2009 and make sure the American people still get their tax
relief.''
But that deficit-cutting claim is likely to come under assault from
Democrats charging Bush can meet the pledge only by leaving out the
long-term cost of the war in Iraq and by proposing unrealistic budget
cuts and fees.
``I think the president will send us a budget with triple-digit deficits
for the rest of his presidency can't avoid it and without any credible
plan to balance the budget,'' said Rep. John Spratt Jr. of South
Carolina, top Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
The upcoming budget, to be submitted Feb. 6, opens an annual debate with
Congress over tax and spending priorities. Last year, fresh from his
re-election, Bush had high hopes for overhauling Social Security with
private accounts. This year was supposed to be the year for reform the
bloated tax code.
The first year of a term is when most presidents find success on the
budget. Ronald Reagan and Bush produced landmark tax cuts, while Bill
Clinton won adoption of a tax-heavy deficit reduction plan in 1993 and a
budget-balancing plan produced with congressional Republicans in 1997.
Instead, Social Security reform never got off the ground and Bush's tax
reform commission produced some recommendations that his tax experts
disagreed with.
To be sure, Bush and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill last year combined
to take on the skyrocketing costs of federal entitlement programs such
as Medicaid. Although modest, the $39 billion measure
slated for a final House vote Wednesday is the first attempt in eight
years to tackle such benefit spending.
And, despite reluctance from old-school Republicans such as Senate
Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Miss., Congress pretty
much acquiesced in Bush's proposal last year to cut 1 percent from the
budgets of domestic agencies. Some 89 programs were eliminated entirely,
producing $6.5 billion in savings.
Despite last year's success, Republicans are anxious about spending, in
part due to the enormous price tag of military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan $8 billion to $9 billion per month and the Hurricane Katrina
relief and rebuilding effort, whose tab is up to $99 billion over five
years, including appropriations, tax incentives and flood insurance
borrowing authority.
Posted by Chris Schrimpf
Comments
marshall cabinet
Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes. Kristal Marshall.
Posted by Kristal Marshall on October 10th 03:03:40 AM
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