Sirotablog

David Sirota's online magazine of news & commentary
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Monday, February 06, 2006

The Real Cost of Bush's Budget

Surprise, surprise. Josh Marshall catches media outlets describing President Bush's new budget as deficit reducing. That claim is just laughable. The budget is comprised of basically three different blatant moves and two quiet ones.

The blatant moves are: 1) Slashing domestic spending on those awful programs like Medicare, Medicaid, education, community policing, student loans, and food aid. 2) Increasing funding for security budgets. 3) Making the tax cuts permanent.

Even with just these three pieces, it gets real tough to claim that this is as a budget to fight the deficit.

But it gets worse when you realize what else is happening. First, Bush still isn't including costs from Alternative Minimum Tax reform. He also is lowballing the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (still).

Sadly, some media outlets are still letting the White House comm operation get away with this tripe after five years.

What do we call this? Oh yeah, Stockholm Syndrome.

--Matt Singer

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