(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-02-04 10:56

"This administration is going to hand the next president a fiscal meltdown," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said Sunday. "This is a budget that sticks it to the middle class, comforts the wealthy and has a set of priorities that are not the priorities of the American people."

Bush's budget reflects the outlines of a US$145 billion stimulus plan that the president is urging Congress to pass quickly to combat the growing threat of a recession.

While the House passed a stimulus bill close to the president's outline, Senate Democrats are trying to expand the measure to include cash relief for older people and extended unemployment benefits.

Bush's five-year blueprint makes his first-term tax cuts permanent while still claiming to get the budget into balance by 2012, three years after he leaves office.

Republicans are pledging to protect those first-term tax cuts. But Democrats, including the party's presidential candidates, want to retain the tax cuts that benefit lower and middle-income taxpayers while rolling back the tax cuts for the wealthy.

Democrats say Bush's budget is built on flawed math. Beyond 2009, the budget plan does not include any money to keep the alternative minimum tax, which was aimed at the wealthy, from ensnaring millions of middle-income people. It also includes only US$70 billion to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009, just a fraction of the US$200 billion they are expected to cost this year.

Reflecting strong lobbying by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush's budget includes a request to hire nearly 1,100 new diplomats to address severe staffing shortages and put the State Department on track to meet an ambitious call to double its size over the next decade.

In a change from last year, the administration is also seeking to increase spending on the State Children's Health Insurance Program by US$19.7 billion over the next five years. That request is midway between the US$5 billion increase requested by Bush last year and the US$35 billion increase in bills passed by Congress but vetoed by Bush in October and December.

Bush also proposes boosting spending in some areas of education such as Title I grants, the main source of federal support for poor students. But at the same time, Bush seeks to eliminate 47 other education programs that are seen as unnecessary including programs to encourage art in the schools, bring low-income students on trips to Washington and provide mental health services.

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