John Merline asks, Did Anyone Actually Read Bush’s Budget? As it turns out:
- The Defense budget is going down, not up
- Ditto Homeland Security
- Education spending is through the roof
- Medicare “cuts” aren’t cuts at all
As he points out:
Bush’s 2007 budget is an extremely modest attempt to rein in what has been one of the most prolific spending sprees in modern American history. Under Bush, overall federal spending has climbed 20%. And that’s after adjusting for inflation. (By comparison, spending climbed 12.7% in real terms during the Clinton years.)Bush’s 2007 is about $500 billion above where federal spending would be if he simply maintained the spending trend set by Bill Clinton.
It would be nice to blame the war on terror, or the growth in entitlement programs, for this climb. But spending on things other than Defense and Homeland Security, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and Medicare, actually rose at a faster rate — 23%.