Bush Budget Denounced by Massachusetts Congressmen
REACT
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Jason Millman
Boston University Washington News Service
Feb. 5, 2008
WASHINGTON – Massachusetts House members denounced President
Bush’s record $3.1 trillion budget proposal Tuesday, contending his 2009 fiscal
year plan sets unrealistic expectations for economic recovery and calls for crippling cuts
to essential social service programs.
“It’s very disappointing,” U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester, said in a telephone interview. “It’s a budget that doesn’t deal with the harsh economic realities that so many citizens are facing. If it ever were enacted, it would hurt a lot of people.”
Mr. McGovern said he believed congressional Republicans and Democrats alike are against the president’s budget.
U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, echoing a common sentiment that Mr. Bush’s proposed budget will be drastically altered in Congress, called the final budget of the president’s administration “unrealistic.”
“It doesn’t include an accurate assessment of needs in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mr. Neal said in telephone interview. “The president is saying you can have tax cuts and have more and more money for Iraq.”
Mr. Bush’s proposal projects that the budget deficit will rise to $407 billion in 2009, not far from the record-high $413 billion set four years ago. Mr. Bush inherited a $127 billion surplus when he entered office, and he said his budget can provide a $48 billion surplus by 2012. Mr. McGovern called the president’s projection “laughable.”
“This is a president who campaigned for office as a fiscal conservative, and under his leadership, we now have the biggest deficit and debt in the history of the U.S.,” Mr. McGovern said.
Mr. Bush, in the nation’s first-ever $3 trillion budget proposal, calls for $515.4 billion for the Defense Department budget—when adjusted for inflation, the highest amount of annual military spending since World War II
Mr. Neal said the budget proposes program cuts that are too severe, especially to Medicaid and Medicare, which stand to lose $196 billion over the next five years under Bush’s proposal.
“UMass Medical Center and many of the community hospitals rely on Medicare and Medicaid for revenue to sustain their great institutions,” Mr. Neal said.
Proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid funding would “force our hospitals to dip that much more into their already squeezed budgets,” U.S. Rep. John W. Olver, D-Amherst, said in a statement.
Mr. Olver decried Mr. Bush’s proposed cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides money to low-income families to help pay home heating costs. Mr. Bush’s budget calls for $1.7 billion for the program, with an additional $300 million in contingency funds, for a total of $2 billion next year, a 22 percent drop from the $2.57 billion the program received this year.
Almost 140,000 Massachusetts families receive some sort of assistance from the program, according to the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.
“It is unconscionable that the president has targeted this program for cuts despite the fact that home heating costs have increased by 80 percent since he took office,” Mr. Olver said.
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