As the news has been busy reporting, the President’s federal budget proposal was sent to congress today. One of the major points that is being stressed is the significant reduction in Medicaire/Medicaid spending. On the surface this is being advertised as an attempt to rein in “Mandatory” spending on these programs. What I found most interesting is that there have been 6 years of Republican lead Congresses for the President to forward this agenda, why wait until the Congress is in Democratic control to make this move?
I’ve been trying to find past Presidential budgets for the last 6 years to compare, but in the process came across a set of charts by the Heritage Foundation (a generally regarded right-leaning organization). Although the final slides, make (IMHO) fairly bizarre claims that retaining the tax cuts will somehow fix the future tax problems, the rest of the discussion is fairly interesting. On one hand this set of charts explains how much the budget has grown in the Bush administration and how debt is reaching record levels. On the other hand, it discusses how Medicare/Medicaid spending are growing faster than any other budgetary area. Strangely the ‘cyclic’ nature of the defense spending is used to explain the exponential growth in recent budgets, yet the extrapolation for all other spending grows linearly 40 years into the future.
Of course, regardless of who’s extrapolation one uses, there is clearly a budgetary problem that will grow with the various social programs.
I especially like Section 4 which shows the discretionary funds (read as ‘pork’) and how the President has failed to exercise his veto (even less than his predecessors) with his party fellows in the Congress. It will be interesting to see if this remains the case (not that it would be so bad to have some of the pork projects tossed in the grinder). Of course the total outlay for this pork spending is in the noise compared to any number of other budget areas ($29 billion in this category in 2006 vs $2.9 trillion budget this year)
Its interesting to see how the most recent Democratic administrations have been the only ones where revenue has exceeded spending. I suppose one can argue that this is due to exorbitant taxation, but who will pay for the debt we are accruing.
So I haven’t answered my original question, but I’ll leave that for another day of research.
