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Touring a struggling job-training site, Democrat John Kerry on Friday sought to refocus the presidential race on pocketbook issues, warning of “almost criminal” cuts in bedrock training and education programs. “I’m tired of talking about valuing families and not valuing families,” Kerry said. “There are unbelievable, unacceptable, staggering numbers of young lives that are being abandoned in our country.” Kerry held a town hall meeting at a job-training site where officials said their budget and the number of students they can train have been slashed because of cuts. “This is pretty simple. The workplace of the United States of America...

CHICAGO (AP) -- Touring a struggling job-training site, Democrat John Kerry on Friday sought to refocus the presidential race on pocketbook issues, warning of "almost criminal" cuts in bedrock training and education programs. "I'm tired of talking about valuing families and not valuing families," Kerry said. "There are unbelievable, unacceptable, staggering numbers of young lives that are being abandoned in our country." Kerry held a town hall meeting at a job-training site where officials said their budget and the number of students they can train have been slashed because of cuts. "This is pretty simple. The workplace of the United...

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has accused President Bush of shortchanging the nation's veterans by cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs budget, increasing many veterans' health care costs and excluding thousands more from the system altogether. The facts are a bit more complicated. Kerry has repeatedly accused Bush, for example, of cutting the agency's budget. "This president is breaking faith with veterans all across the country," he said at a Democratic presidential debate in January. "They've cut the VA budget by $1.8 billion."

Theresa Anderson has lived on the street, and she wants never to go back. If you haven't been homeless, it is difficult to imagine how frightening the Bush administration's proposed cuts in the nation's principal housing assistance program are to people like Anderson who depend on housing vouchers. "Without housing help, I wouldn't have been able to get back on my feet," Anderson said. "There would have been no way to get a roof over my head." President Bush's fiscal 2005 budget calls for cutting the voucher program by more than $1.6billion next year and $4.6billion by 2009. That's 30...

Fiscal restraint often goes out the window in election years as politicians create new programs and expand entitlements to send home the bacon. The Bush administration, however, has taken on constituencies and politicians of both parties by producing a budget that proposes to eliminate 65 federal programs even as the president threatens to veto a big-spending transportation bill. To George W. Bush's critics on the right, still angry about his signing of the 2002 farm bill, adding a prescription-drug entitlement to Medicare, proposing to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by 15 percent, and not once...

Some military voters may abandon Bush President might be losing support among veterans, service members and their families By WILLIAM DOUGLASKnight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON — When the Bush campaign asked James McKinnon to co-chair its veterans steering committee in New Hampshire — a job he held in 2000 — the 56-year-old Vietnam veteran respectfully, but firmly, said no. “I basically told them I was disappointed in his support of veterans,” said McKinnon, who served two tours in Vietnam with the Coast Guard. “He’s killing the active-duty military. ... Look at the reserve call-ups for Iraq, the hardships. The National Guard...

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS FROM: GARY SCHMITT SUBJECT: Cut Defense?  If congressional “budget hawks” have their way, there will be cuts made to the Bush administration’s defense spending package. Last week, the Republican-controlled Senate Budget Committee voted to slice $7 billion from the Pentagon’s FY 2005 budget. The ostensible reason for the reduction is the large federal deficit. With the national defense budget authority up by nearly $90 billion since 2001, the presumption is that there is room to cut. But this is not the case. Adjusted for inflation, the $423 billion in defense budget authority requested for FY 2005 is only 15% more...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The tax cuts and other policies President Bush proposed in his $2.4 trillion budget would probably have a minimal impact on the economy, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday. In its annual report on the president's budget, the agency that provides fiscal analysis for lawmakers said Bush's proposals could either increase or reduce economic output through 2009, and improve it in the following five years. "However, the differences are likely to be small, affecting output by less than one-half of one percentage point on average," the study said. The conclusion by the budget office comes in...

Military veterans have already played a prominent role in the 2004 presidential campaign, helping to propel one of their own -- Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts -- close to the Democratic nomination. If he is the nominee, Kerry is counting on strong support from his fellow veterans in the general election battle against President Bush.

President Bush's budget would produce deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projected Friday in the first authoritative look at the plan's longer-range implications. The forecast, $737 billion worse than the budget office expects should Congress ignore Bush's tax and spending plans, is sure to factor into this year's presidential and congressional campaigns. Bush sent lawmakers a $2.4 trillion budget for 2005 on Feb. 2, but it projected outward for only five years. The White House argues that longer-range forecasts are guesswork, but Democrats say the administration wants to hide later deficits that will career...

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites)'s budget would produce deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites) projected Friday in the first authoritative look at the plan's longer-range implications. The forecast — $737 billion worse than the budget office expects should Congress ignore Bush's tax and spending plans — is sure to factor into this year's presidential and congressional campaigns. Bush sent lawmakers a $2.4 trillion budget for 2005 on Feb. 2, but it projected outward only for five years. The White House argues that longer-range forecasts are guesswork, but...

John Kerry -- running in part on his record as a Vietnam veteran -- insists President Bush -- "[has] not kept faith with veterans across the country, and one of the first definitions of patriotism is keeping faith with those who wore the uniform of our country." Kerry specifically accuses the president of cutting the Veterans Administration budget. But, in fact, that funding is now higher than at any point in the past ten years, and it's going up twice as fast under President Bush than under President Clinton. What's more, according to the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy...

‘Everything on table’ GOP plans cuts, reforms, to tackle budgetary woes By Alexander Bolton and Sam Dealey House Republicans hope to enact a host of measures aimed at curbing what both centrist and conservative lawmakers decry as runaway federal spending. Emerging from a rare members-only “mandatory” two-and-a-half-hour conference called yesterday to deal with mounting budget concerns, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told reporters: “Nothing is sacred in this business. Everything is on the table.” Although Hastert didn’t say so, several initiatives under consideration would curb the power of the Republican leadership as well as House appropriators and authorizers. These initiatives...

William Niskanen is a fiscal conservative of the first rank, a lifelong advocate of government parsimony. His doctorate in economics is from the University of Chicago, the pantheon of conservative economic thought. He was an economic adviser in the Reagan administration. He now is chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. In short, he is a devoted believer in the mantra of lower taxes and smaller government. Yet now, in a painful twist of political stereotypes, Niskanen is so perturbed about President Bush's proposed $2.4 trillion budget that he speaks the seeming unspeakable when asked whom he would...

<p>Some Republican voters are beginning to ask if having a liberal Democrat in the White House with a Republican majority in Congress is the only way to restrain federal spending.</p> <p>Many fiscally concerned Republicans concede they now long for a return to the days of gridlock, when one party controlled at least one house of Congress, while the other party occupied the Oval Office.</p>

<p>During the Reagan years, conservatives were willing to live with big spending. What's changed?</p> <p>Unlike most families, the federal government can perpetually spend more than it takes in and still remain fiscally sound. That's because unlike us mortals, Uncle Sam isn't going to retire. His income isn't going to top off in middle age and slip in his golden years. The occasional but short-lived downturn notwithstanding, it will continue to grow with the economy, forever.</p>

George W. Bush Angers Conservatives Howard Dean isn't the only presidential candidate suffering a self-inflicted meltdown. There's a certain Republican with the same problem, and we don't mean Wesley Clark the former Reaganite. President Bush has so angered his conservative base by spending more than any Democrat in history and pandering to illegal aliens that Republican congressmen, stunned by constituents' complaints, met privately with Karl Rove to unload, the Washington Times revealed Friday. "I would say 97 out of 100 of our members who asked questions laid into him pretty good about spending and the lack of discipline on the...

Budget Director Joshua Bolten has privately issued an unprecedented challenge to unhappy conservative Republicans in Congress: Go ahead and cut President Bush's domestic budget if you can. We won't oppose you. Bolten addressed GOP lawmakers assembled in Philadelphia just before the budget was released. Conservatives grumbled that Bush's proposed increase in discretionary domestic spending of only one quarter of one percent was bogus, because its reductions in popular programs never will pass Congress.

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) --On the same day a poison-laced letter shuttered Senate offices, President Bush asked Congress to eliminate an $8.2 million research program on how to decontaminate buildings attacked by toxins.</p> <p>Buried in documents justifying Bush's 2005 budget proposal released Monday is an Environmental Protection Agency acknowledgment that his proposed cut "represents complete elimination of homeland security building decontamination research."</p>

<p>Congress is likely to restore the cuts in funding for local emergency services that President Bush had proposed in his 2005 budget, despite the pressure to control spending, said Republican lawmakers and congressional aides yesterday.</p> <p>In all, the budget of the Office of Domestic Preparedness — the "one-stop shop" that now dispenses almost all federal homeland security funds destined for state and local governments and responders — has seen its budget cut by about $800 million or just under 20 percent.</p>

<p>Here's what President Bush's budget proposal boils down to: record deficit projections that do not take into account obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with program cuts that Congress probably will reject. If anything, the administration is lowballing the shortfall.</p>

<p>GO TO the White House website, and you can read George W. Bush's sober and reassuring words about his proposed budget for fiscal year 2005.</p> <p>"We're calling upon Congress to be wise with the taxpayer's money," the president told reporters on Monday. "We look forward to working with them to bring fiscal discipline to the appropriations process so we can cut the deficit in half over a five year period of time."</p>

President Bush's new budget proposes to cut numerous programs that he and others in his administration have previously hailed as successes or top priorities. In the environmental area, the president proposed eliminating $25 million in Department of Housing and Urban Development grants to rehabilitate "brownfield" industrial sites; the Office of Management and Budget said other programs are "more effective." But two years ago, when Bush went to Pennsylvania to highlight his administration's commitment to brownfields, the White House issued a press release celebrating the fact that his 2003 budget "includes $25 million in funding for urban redevelopment and brownfields cleanup...

<p>Congressional Republicans, in an extraordinary break with the White House in an election year, say President Bush's 2005 budget proposal "doesn't go far enough" to restrain government spending and are considering pursuing further cuts in outlays.</p> <p>Rep. Jim Nussle of Iowa, chairman of the House Budget Committee, yesterday said Republicans and the White House should even be willing to trim wasteful spending in the Defense and Homeland Security departments.</p>

Hundreds of new immigration enforcement jobs, including 236 personnel to find aliens that have defied final deportation orders, would be created under President Bush's fiscal 2005 budget proposal. The budget would add staff to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention and removals branch, which expels illegal aliens from the United States. The unit extradited 142,008 aliens in fiscal 2003, but faces a daunting backlog of immigration cases. Roughly 400,000 aliens have fled after receiving a final order of deportation from an immigration judge. The staffing increases would be the first for the office in two years, according to...

<p>WASHINGTON - Just a few years after facing extinction, the National Endowment for the Arts got a healthy $18 million increase in President Bush's budget for fiscal year 2005, with an assist from first lady Laura Bush.</p> <p>The arts agency, once the scourge of Republican lawmakers for funding controversial art projects, got a spike in funding to $139.4 million in the budget released this week, the largest increase since 1984.</p>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One day after proposing bigger budgets for defense and homeland security, the White House on Tuesday released a list of the 128 programs it wants gutted, from education equity for women to combating alcohol abuse, a problem President Bush faced himself. While calling on Congress to rein in domestic spending to address a record budget deficit, Bush has made education reform a key plank in his campaign for reelection in November and announced in last month's State of the Union address a $300 million program to help released prisoners re-integrate into society. His wife, Laura, has traveled...

President Bush has drafted an election-year budget that shows considerably more political concern for his conservative base, which is upset over the government's steady growth, than for any need to assuage moderate voters in November. [SNIP] The proposed cuts, in dollar terms, will have little impact on the budget deficit, which the White House put at $521 billion this year. But the names of several programs on the chopping block -- housing assistance for the elderly, vocational education, lead-hazard reduction, local law enforcement grants -- allow the president to argue that he has put forth a tough-minded spending plan for...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration pushed for expansion of managed care health plans as a way to bring costs down in the Medicare program, but the president's 2005 budget assumes those programs will be more costly than traditional Medicare for the foreseeable future. Projections of the number of seniors who will enroll in managed care plans under Medicare are driving part of the higher cost estimates for the new Medicare law that President Bush signed in December. In the budget proposal released Monday, the administration figures that more than 12 million seniors will get their health care through health...

A Bush administration budget vow to cut the record $521 billion deficit in half by 2009 assumes higher tax revenues and restrained spending while excluding key areas sure to require hefty outlays, like Iraq. By turns defensive and accommodating, the budget tries to tamp down the worries that Democrats have exploited ahead of November presidential elections about whether the White House is acting responsibly with the nation's finances. In particular, with a bulge of retirees set to swell Social Security rolls by the end of the decade, Democrats have argued that time was running out to prepare for the increase...

President Proposes Increase in Minority AIDS Funding; 2005 Budget Also Includes ADAP Expansion 1/16/04 3:15:00 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National Desk, Medical Reporter Contact: HHS Press Office, 202-690-6343 WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 /U.S. Newswire/ -- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced today that President Bush's fiscal year 2005 budget request includes a 6 percent increase in the HIV/AIDS in Minority Communities Fund, as the Department continues its efforts to reduce health disparities. The budget also includes a 5 percent increase in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) within the Ryan White Care Act. The budget...

The $410.7 billion defense budget request for fiscal 2005 fully funds current readiness while maintaining course for transforming the military, DoD officials said here today. Under the proposal, service members would receive a 3.5 percent across-the- board pay raise. The request also would increase the basic allowance for housing to eliminate all out-of-pocket expenses for service members. The budget priority is to win the war on terror, said a senior defense official briefing on background. "We are at war," he said. Readiness accounts – operations and maintenance – must be fully funded, he said. Army tank miles are set at...

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) is fond of demanding fiscal discipline from Congress, but even some of his supporters say he should practice what he preaches. His administration's mushrooming cost projection for Medicare is the latest budget item to inflict sticker shock on the lawmakers he often lectures about profligate spending. With the White House estimating the next budget deficit at a record $521 billion, fellow conservatives are beginning to question this staple of Bush's stump speech: "I came to this office to solve problems, not to pass them on to future presidents and future generations." Chris...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush sent Congress a $2.4 trillion election-year budget on Monday featuring big increases for defense and homeland security but also a record $521 billion deficit.</p> <p>To battle the soaring deficits, Bush proposed squeezing scores of government programs and sought outright spending cuts in seven of 16 Cabinet-level agencies. The Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency were targeted for the biggest reductions.</p>

PRESIDENT BUSH is trying to buy the 2004 election. It isn't going to work. He needs to get smart about spending, and now. Conservatives predicted that the $400 billion price tag on the President's Medicare prescription drug bill was underestimated. Last week they were proved right as it was revealed that the plan will cost at least $540 billion — a third larger than projected. Conservatives predicted that the federal deficit would increase dramatically without spending cuts. Last week they were proved right as the Congressional Budget Office projected a $100 billion increase in the deficit, and the White House...

The president's proposed fiscal 2005 budget boosts defense spending to continue the war on terror, providing another pay raise for troops and increasing homeland security spending. "We will devote the resources necessary to win the war on terror and protect our homeland," President Bush said Jan. 31 during his weekly radio address to the nation. With U.S. forces deployed worldwide in the fight against terrorism, Bush noted his proposed budget boosts defense spending by 7 percent, with money earmarked for equipment, ammunition and troop housing. "We'll keep our military strong and ready for every challenge that may come," the commander...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Facing a record $521 billion election-year deficit, President Bush will propose a $2.4 trillion budget Monday that will cut dozens of programs, roll back some business tax breaks and set deficit-reduction goals that even fellow Republicans are skeptical he can meet.While giving large increases to homeland security and the military -- key planks of his reelection campaign -- the fiscal 2005 budget that Bush will send to Congress will call for limiting growth in other spending to just 0.5 percent.Because that is well below the rate of inflation, it would amount to a cut in government programs....

WHILE the eyes of the world saw Massachusetts Senator John Kerry defeat his Democratic rivals in the New Hampshire primary, President Bush also tasted victory Tuesday night. He beat 13 obscure GOP rivals by securing 85 percent of the vote. Nonetheless, Team Bush should heed Granite State conservatives. They warn that GOP voters here, like concerned Republicans across America, are tired of runaway spending and ever-expanding government in Washington, all under Republican rule. “There’s no question in my mind that a ticket of John Kerry and (North Carolina senator) John Edwards will get at least as many votes, which makes...

<p>Potential good news for prospective home buyers is a proposal by the Bush Administration to include a "zero down payment" mortgage as part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2005 fiscal year budget. The proposal could generate about 150,000 additional home buyers in the first year alone, according to HUD officials. The proposal would allow qualified home buyers to avoid the current 3 percent down payment requirement for a Federal Housing Administration loan. Such FHA-backed loans can be as high as $173,423 on a single-family house in the seven-county Pittsburgh region.</p>

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - President Bush vowed on Saturday to hold the line on spending as he sought to reassure members of his own party who are upset at record budget deficits. The president told a gathering of congressional Republicans that the task of restraining spending would be a tough one in an election year when politicians are loath to cut popular programs. "This is going to be a challenging year for making sure we spend the people's money wisely," he said. But Bush said he wanted to send a "clear signal" to the public and to financial markets that the...

It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will — not facts, social science or history. Personally, I don't believe the Bush team will pay a long-term political price for its faith-based intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Too many Americans, including me,...

Jan. 31, 2004, 10:36AM Bush: Budget has compassion Associated Press WASHINGTON -- President Bush says his 2005 budget will balance national security, social needs and fiscal responsibility, but Democrats say his policies have wounded the economy and prompted sky-high federal deficits. Bush plans to send Congress an election-year budget exceeding $2.3 trillion Monday. Officials revealed new details including more money to fight AIDS in poor countries, and a spare 0.5 percent increase for non-defense, non-domestic security programs as part of his effort to halve record deficits by 2009. "We will devote the resources necessary to win the war on terror...

<p>President Bush's $2.4 trillion budget for 2005 would ease away from tax breaks for energy and business favored by Republicans while cutting spending on programs from environment to community development, GOP officials said Saturday.</p> <p>Bush's election-year fiscal plan, which he plans to ship to Congress on Monday, also envisions cutting spending on agriculture, natural resources and energy, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Further reflecting the pressures mounting federal deficits have heaped on him, his plan will edge only slightly toward the extra highway spending many members of both parties are demanding, said the officials.</p>

Bush to Back Off Some Initiatives for Budget PlanBy ROBERT PEAR and EDMUND L. ANDREWS ASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — President Bush will propose a $2.3 trillion budget on Monday that backs away from some of the major spending and tax initiatives he supported in prior years, administration officials say.Constrained by big budget deficits and political realities, the officials said they would retreat on some of their own ideas and oppose others favored by Republicans in Congress.Mr. Bush will try instead to lock in some of his prior victories, by pressing Congress for a permanent extension of most of the tax...

<p>Washington -- A wily Bakersfield Republican who strikes fear among friend and foe on Capitol Hill has out-maneuvered the White House and Senate Republicans on President Bush's premier domestic policy: the elimination of the tax on corporate dividends.</p> <p>It will be Bill Thomas' reduction of the tax on dividends and capital gains -- not the elimination of the dividend tax that Bush introduced with tremendous fanfare in January and has lobbied for ever since -- that will be in a $350 billion, 10-year tax cut package agreed to Wednesday that Bush will tout as his signature domestic achievement this year.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) - Proof that life exists outside the boundaries of Earth continues to elude scientists, but President Bush's budget suggests that ``space aliens'' may be out there. And it could just be a matter of time before they are discovered. In a brief passage titled ``Where Are the Real Space Aliens?'' Bush's budget document released Monday says several important scientific discoveries in the past decade indicate that ``habitable worlds'' in outer space may be much more prevalent than once thought.The finds include evidence of currently or previously existing large bodies of water - a key ingredient of life as...