Skewed budget priorities

Washington Post: If the federal budget is a mirror of national priorities, consider this skewed choice in President Bush's spending plan: By 2009, child care assistance would be cut for at least 200,000 children in low- and moderate-income families -- and that's by the administration's own estimates. The real number of children affected could be as high as 365,000. That same year, those with annual incomes of $1 million or more would be paying an average of $155,000 less in income taxes as a result of Mr. Bush's tax cuts.
This is no isolated example. The administration proposes almost nothing to tackle the mandatory spending programs that now eat up nearly two-thirds of the $2.4 trillion budget. It insists that Mr. Bush's tax cuts be made permanent, at a cost of nearly $1 trillion over the next decade. That means programs for the poorest and most vulnerable would be cut.
Because the administration would increase spending on defense, homeland security and international affairs, what's left on the discretionary chopping block is less than one-sixth of the federal budget. Spending on such programs would be essentially frozen in 2005. With boosts in some areas, such as space flight, other programs would be subject to deeper reductions.
The number of families served by the low-income housing voucher program could drop by more than 250,000; a program to transform run-down public housing projects into mixed-income neighborhoods would be eliminated.
Worst is saved for last
Yet that's not the draconian part of the administration's plan. The truly painful cuts would come down the road; by 2009, the slice of the budget that reflects discretionary spending outside of defense and homeland security would fall from $391 billion in 2005 to $386 billion in 2009. Adjusted for expected inflation, the cut would be $50 billion.
The administration does its best to obscure the real harm these reductions would entail. For this election-year budget, it finds room for politically attractive increases. The budget boasts, for example, that disadvantaged school districts and special education each get an extra $1 billion in 2005. What it doesn't say is that in the following years, money would be cut.
The budget documents obscure the impact of cuts by omitting the usual tables that list program-by-program spending for following years. While such projections have been included in budgets for the last three decades, this administration simply makes them disappear -- a maneuver that lets the administration claim credit for its supposed fiscal discipline without being blamed for the callousness of its choices. Only in reams of computer data transmitted to Congress -- and analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities -- are the implications of its budget plans to be found.