A Budget is Nigh
WASHINGTON, March 1-The Senate Budget Committee could vote on a spending proposal for fiscal year 2006 as early as the end of next week keeping the Senate on track for meeting April’s budget deadline, Sen. Judd Gregg, the committee’s chairman, said Tuesday.
The spending in the budget will be in line with President Bush’s recommendations, the New Hampshire Republican said in a telephone interview.
“The president has written the initial memo here, and I think he sets responsible goals, which is to have fiscal responsibility and reduce the rate of growth of the entitlements and basically freeze non-defense discretionary spending,” Gregg said. “That’s been our goal.”
In addition to asking Congress to freeze funds for programs that are neither defense-related nor mandatory, Bush also slashed 150 programs. Some senators may try to save those programs, which include 48 education programs, Gregg said, but he would not comment on which ones, if any, he would personally try to preserve.
“We have to set priorities. We’re like a family that has an income and we’re spending a lot more of that income,” he said. “To keep that up, we’re going to have a bankruptcy in the family, and we don’t want to go in that direction.”
One priority the president set in his Feb. 7 budget proposal was to reduce the costs of the Medicaid program.
“I think what we should do is basically what the president suggests, which is reduce rate of growth, use the money we have for Medicaid for delivering services for people who need health care who are poor and give governors a lot more flexibility,” the former governor said. “With more flexibility, the governors, I suspect, can do a lot more, even if they may not be getting as much money.”
He added: “You are talking about a program that will spend.next year.approximately $190 billion and talking about reducing the rate of growth by less than $500 million. That’s not radical surgery, that’s a reasonable reduction of the rate of growth, especially when you consider that so much of the money in Medicaid doesn’t actually end up in health care, it ends up in the general operating accounts of the state governments.”
Not on the to-do list for 2006 is Medicare, in part because of the planned Social Security overhaul, Gregg said.
“The reason we’re not doing them together is because even getting Social Security done has become a major problem, and Social Security is a much more solvable problem,” Gregg said. “The substance of the issue of fixing Social Security is fairly simple; it’s the politics which are very difficult. Whereas in Medicare, the complexity of the Medicare issue is exponentially larger than the Social Security issue because there are so many moving parts to our health care system.”
New devices, procedures and medications cost more but add health benefits, which Gregg said makes them difficult things to balance. In addition, he said, “unlike Social Security there is no clear way to resolving the problem.”
Despite there being a “clear solution” to Social Security in Gregg’s mind, there is still disagreement on Capitol Hill over the president’s desire to introduce personal savings accounts. The transition from the current system to the account system could add more than $1 trillion to the deficit. At the same time the government is attempting to cut the $427 billion deficit in half, something Gregg highlighted as a key goal of the budget in a speech to the Senate on Monday.
“It’s as if you were starting a restaurant and you had to put some money down to get it started, but you knew in four or five years you were going to make that money back, plus a lot of money. That’s the way you look at the Social Security fix,” he said Tuesday. “You put money down to fix it today, but in the long run you will be getting that money back as you will have resolved your liability.”
Despite the contentious debates sure to follow the proposed entitlement changes this year, Gregg said he hopes to pass a budget for 2006. “We haven’t had a budget two out of last three years, so I think it’s fairly obvious that getting a budget is not an easy exercise. I don’t know that we’ll be able to pass one, but I certainly hope to,” he said.
“But I see no point in passing a budget that is superficial,” he added. “I think it’s got to be substantive and has to be willing to control spending, and so I’m going to push for a strong, fiscally responsible budget. And if I don’t get it, so be it, but I am not interested in window dressing.”
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