Bush budget seen maintaining
Annual shortfall put at over $200m for next decade
(Correction: Because of an editing error, a headline in Saturday's Nation pages on a story about President Bush's budget said the annual federal deficit would be $200 million. The deficit would be $200 billion.)
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's budget would keep federal deficits at more than $200 billion annually over the next decade, Congress's top budget analyst said yesterday in a report raising doubts about White House efforts to contain the shortfalls.
The analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Bush's plans for spending and taxes would yield deficits through the decade ending in 2015 totaling $2.58 trillion. That is $1.6 trillion higher than they would be if none of the president's fiscal plans becomes law, the budget office said, the chief factor being his plan to make already-enacted tax cuts permanent.
The congressional office said it thinks cumulative deficits over the next decade will be $125 billion higher than it estimated only last January. That is largely because it has added $70 billion to its projected 10-year cost of Medicare spending, about 1 percent more, including $54 billion more for the cost of prescription drug coverage.
The new figures were released days before the House and Senate budget committees plan to write their spending plans for the coming year. The panels' chairmen, Representative Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa, and Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, have been hunting for GOP support for packages following Bush's proposals to restrain spending and cut deficits in half by 2009. ''The president has rightly called for fiscal discipline in every area, and I hope Congress has the courage to meet that challenge," Gregg said.
Democrats said Bush's plans are merely making things worse.
''The administration's fiscal policies are moving us deeper and deeper into debt," said Representative John Spratt of South Carolina, top Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
The figures also highlight the longer-term budget problems that lie ahead as the 78-million-strong baby boom generation starts retiring later this decade and drawing on already costly programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
Bush's budget projected figures for the next five years only. He projected shortfalls through 2010 totaling almost $1.34 trillion, $57 billion less than the congressional office estimated.
Yesterday's numbers also raised new doubts about Bush's goal of halving federal deficits in five years by projecting a 2009 deficit of $246 billion.
That would fulfill Bush's goal of halving the $521 billion shortfall he projected for last year, a projection that ended up being $109 billion too high. But it would not be close to cutting last year's actual $412 billion deficit in half.
