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player ready...Offering a glimpse of the tradeoffs that will come with President Bush’s budget, administration officials revealed Sunday that some corporate subsidies will be cut and said duplicative programs for the homeless face trimming.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the opening session of a National Governors’ Association in Washington that Bush’s budget “brings to the federal government a discipline that it sorely needs.”
Cabinet members promised the governors access and flexibility, and urged them to lobby Congress for the budget and tax cut.
“Yes, there will be people that will be able to find programs that they think are underfunded or overfunded,” Card said. “But the budget does reflect the priorities of America. And when you find that line item that you don’t like, step back and take a look at the budget that you do like.”
Bush will detail his budget strategy while addressing a joint session of Congress on Tuesday evening.
The next day, he will submit a blueprint that he has said will “restrain spending, yet meet growing needs with a reasonable 4 percent growth rate.” That is a bit more than inflation but less than the growth rate of 8 percent last year and an average of 6 percent in the past three years.
Bush has repeatedly pointed out that in most cases, he will not propose cuts to programs but instead will designate a slower growth rate.
Mitchell Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said recent budgets had indulged “an unsustainable rate of growth,” and predicted “a good, honest debate” over the value of programs that may have once been a good idea but have become unnecessary.
Daniels was reticent when pressed on what will be cut to pay for the first installment of Bush’s $1.6 trillion tax cut.
“I don’t want to spoil the fun of Tuesday night and Wednesday,” Daniels said.
But he gave a few examples. He said on CNN’s “Late Edition” that in looking for savings, the administration “will start with programs” that duplicate others.
“We have 50 programs for the homeless sprawling across eight departments,” he said. “Those are not particularly the ones I’m looking at here, but we have to be careful with duplication of that kind. There are programs which have outlived their usefulness or even completed their mission.”
On Fox, he said, “We started a program decades ago to bring telephones to rural America. It’s still there, although everybody’s got a telephone. You know, where I’m from, when winter comes, we quit cutting the grass.”
Daniels also said, “There will definitely be some restraint and even some, yes, cuts in terms of government’s involvement and subsidy of corporations through research that they could do on their own, through subsidized loans and investments for products they ought to be building on their own.”
Daniels was a senior vice president at Eli Lilly and Co., the pharmaceutical giant. Daniels said on Fox that a research and development tax credit that benefits the industry will not be cut but is “due to be extended.”
Also on Sunday, the National Governors’ Association proposed extensive changes in Medicaid that would allow states to provide health insurance to millions of additional people, but the benefits would be less generous than those now guaranteed to poor people.
The new policy, drafted by governors of both parties who are here for the association’s 93rd annual meeting, would still guarantee a comprehensive package of benefits for the poorest families, thus “maintaining the health-care safety net for vulnerable populations.”
But the policy says “the current all-or-nothing structure of the Medicaid program” must be changed so states can offer a more modest package of benefits to people with higher incomes.