Bush's budget.

I remember reading in the Economist two years ago that if Bush got a second term the poor would get the shaft because they're not the ones who would have voted for him.

Well, judging by Bush's 2006 budget this would appear to be the truth.

(Don't worry though, Dick Cheney told FOX "It's not something we've done with a meat ax, nor are we suddenly turning our back on the most needy people in our society." Parish the thought. It's not sudden at all, he's right, they've been doing it all along.)

The pentagon get the lion's share of funds while social programs go by the wayside.

Defense would get 419.3 billion, more than the size of Russia's entire economy, and this doesn't even count the billions being spent every month is Afghanistan and Iraq.

Also, democracynow.org puts it in a nutshell:

"President Bush sent Congress a federal budget yesterday that some say reads like a hit list against almost every social program paid for by US taxpayers. It calls for the elimination of some 150 government programs. One out of every three of the targeted programs concerns education.

Bush's plan would slash aid to cities by one-third, eliminate health insurance for thousands of low-income families, reduce veterans' medical benefits, cut funding for city cops and county sheriffs, wipe out child care subsidies for 300,000 families, trim funding for clean water and soil conservation and shutter dozens of programs for preschool children and at-risk youth. The budget also targets public housing, Medicaid and farmers."

The Boston Globe writes:

While the budget's supporting documents say Bush would put the nation on track to slice the deficit by 55 percent by 2009, that is only because of a series of ''scorekeeping gimmicks," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates fiscal responsibility.

''It's easier to achieve your goal if you leave stuff out," Bixby said. ''I do give the president credit for presenting some hard choices on entitlements. But this isn't a realistic budget because of what it leaves out and what it ignores."

See, even the right-wingers are upset.
The NY Times writes:

Mr. Bush's proposals for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 would eliminate or cut back about 150 domestic programs dealing with agriculture, education, health care and the environment, while increasing Pentagon and homeland security expenditures. Mr. Bush also wants the tax cuts he has pushed through Congress in recent years to become permanent.

"Allowing taxes to go back up would only discourage growth and cost this country jobs and reduce paychecks," Mr. Bush told the gathering.

Right, as if anyone has much of a paycheck these days, anyway.
The WaPo says:

The nation's unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent in January -- the lowest level since September 2001 -- from 5.4 percent in December, the Labor Department reported yesterday.

Job growth, however, has slowed in recent months. And the unemployment rate dropped primarily because many people stopped working or looking for jobs, the data showed.

That caused the share of the eligible adult population participating in the labor force to slip to 65.8 percent -- the lowest since May 1988 -- from 66 percent in December. The participation rate reached an all-time high of 67.3 percent in early 2000, at the height of the economic boom that preceded the recession.

A growing number of people over the past year also said they had given up looking because they were discouraged about the likelihood of finding work, the Labor Department said. Others said they stopped seeking employment for a variety of reasons, including family commitments or illness.

Some categories of workers had a harder time than others finding work. The unemployment rate for white workers fell to 4.4 percent in January, from 4.6 percent in December; but the rate for blacks remained more than twice as high, slipping to 10.6 percent from 10.8 percent; the Latino rate fell to 6.1 percent from 6.6 percent.

Workers with less education continued to have higher unemployment rates than the better-educated.
These and other details depict a labor market that continues to improve, but more slowly than in any post-recession period since the department began keeping records in 1939, economists said.

That's pretty encouraging right? Let's keep giving money to the rich and the defense dept. it's working out great so far.

Then there's the great housing situation.

"President Bush's proposed 2005 budget would cut $1 billion from Section 8. Though housing agencies would have flexibility to tailor the program to local needs, there would be fewer vouchers available. At the same time, families with higher incomes would be eligible for a shrinking number of housing subsidies. There are no guarantees that the most needy families would get help. . . .

"This would be counterproductive. Landlords might reject poorer section 8 tenants in favor of those with more money. Many communities, including South Florida, lack enough affordable housing. HUD has been replacing old, densely packed public-housing projects with mixed-income town homes.

Case in point:

A Baltimore family moved out of public housing to a new home in Glen Burnie, but less than a month after moving in, they are being forced out.

Redge Mahaffey is Ewell's landlord. He said MBQ gave him multiple verbal and e-mail commitments saying she could move in. Then on Jan. 31, he got a call from MBQ saying the money wasn't available.

He said $11 million is being cut from the section 8 program in Baltimore because of the federal budget issues. He said all requests to fund additional vouchers for special mobility housing have been denied -- that's the program Ewell expected to help pay the rent.

In Charles County Maryland the problem of a lack of affordable housing is most accute.

The WaPo:

At a hotel called the "White House Hotel,"

...overnight guests occupy just 10 of the 45 rooms. The rest are filled by the working poor, long-term residents who pay $175 a week and stay for months, sometimes years. On weekday mornings, school buses rumble into the parking lot, which is pointed out from the highway by a dented arrow, to pick up nearly two dozen children.

Poverty is not as obvious in Washington's less populated suburbs as it is in the District. But operators of social service agencies said rents have increased so rapidly that people are driven to find shelter in all sorts of places: their cars, unheated trailers, even the woods.

In one extreme case, a Charles woman locked her two young daughters inside a commercial storage unit, which she had turned into a makeshift residence, while she went to work. She pleaded guilty to child endangerment Friday and will be sentenced in April.

"The hotels and motels become our shelters," said Sandy Washington, executive director of Lifestyles Inc., a nonprofit group that places about five people a week at motels in Charles. "If there's nowhere else for people to go, we have no other alternatives."

Then there's health care:

According to a report by Health Affairs:

"In 2001, 1.458 million American families filed for bankruptcy. To investigate medical contributors to bankruptcy, we surveyed 1,771 personal bankruptcy filers in five federal courts and subsequently completed in-depth interviews with 931 of them.

About half cited medical causes, which indicates that 1.9-2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy. Among those whose illnesses led to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs average $11,854 since the start of illness; 75.7 percent had insurance at the onset of illness.

Medical debtors were 42 percent more likely than other debtors to experience lapses in coverage. Even middle-class insured families often fall prey to financial catastrophe when sick."

Hear an interview with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Medical School General Internal Medicine Fellowship program at democracynow.org.

To sum up.

This budget is a declaration of war on the American people, plain an simple. Its mainly a wish list in some respects because W isn't going to go far on a lot of these issue. Cutting farm subsidies isn't going to go anywhere and there are many pet projects congressmen have that they won't want to part with.

People will be hurt, though.

Constance Rice, Condoleeza's cousin, was on Now with David Broncaccio last week and she really hit the nail on the head. What this is all about.

BRANCACCIO: So the President earlier this week, State of the Union, said it is a healthy growing economy, more Americans going back to work. How do you translate a statement like that into the reality that you see when you spend time with working Americans?

CONNIE RICE: I think that the President is indicating that the statistics he sees give him a nice picture of an improving economy. But the reality on the ground, on Main Street, is something completely different. And if you look at what's happened over the last 30 years to the average American working family it's not a good story.

BRANCACCIO: Well, put a number to that courtesy of the LOS ANGELES TIMES. They looked at the early 1970's and a person's income might fluctuate in a given year 25 percent. These days twice as much.

CONNIE RICE: You know, the risk has really increased David. Well, let me give you an example of a family that struggles to put things together in L.A. She's a supermarket cashier and he works on the docks unloading ships. When the supermarket strike hit in Los Angeles, she obviously was out on the picket lines and the supermarkets locked them out which meant, she lost her pay. She had lost her health benefits, they lost their rental apartment because her income went down. And their car went out. He couldn't get to work. They ended up homeless. Now that's an example that is at the bottom. There are a lot of examples of people who are doing-- white collar jobs; they're working in pharmaceutical companies, health benefit companies, or just as accountants and so forth.

We traded-- this is what we traded: we traded security for volatility. And there was a reason that I think people tried to engineer this.

And what I mean by people our politicians and our policy makers decided, I think 35 years ago, that they wanted to smooth out the economy so that business would have a smoother environment. So their risks would be reduced. And there's some good things about that. Inflation stays down, stagnation ended. We've had a lot of prosperity. But the problem is and only a few people got it number one. And number two, for most families we traded a security floor, pensions, life insurance, health insurance, job security. All of that got slashed."

And on to Social Security.

I don't have time to get into that right now, but I'm working on it. Sufice to say Bush's private accounts don't do anything to help the suppossed "crisis" coming on. They just add to it, so the whole debate about these accounts is pointless, unless you're attempting to do away with Social Security, which is a 70 year dream of the GOP.

To see how devious these people are consider this article in the Post last week:

President Bush is trying to keep the word "private" from going public.

As the two parties brace for the coming debate over restructuring Social Security, polls and focus groups for both sides have shown that voters -- especially older ones, who vote in disproportionately heavy numbers -- distrust any change that has the word "private" attached to it.

The White House has a logical idea: Don't use the word. This is difficult because, after all, they would be "private" accounts, and Bush's plan would "partially privatize" Social Security.

So Bush and his supporters have started using "personal accounts" instead of "private accounts" to refer to his plan to let younger workers invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds. Republican officials have begun calling journalists to complain about references to "private accounts,"

Reflecting the new premium being placed on language, Bush turned prickly a week ago Friday during an interview with The Washington Post aboard Air Force One when he was asked if he would talk to Senate Democrats about his "privatization plan."

"You mean the personal savings accounts?" the president scolded. "We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions."

[Update. WaPo poll on Social Security finds "Americans seem not to change their views when the president's plan is characterized as a "private" rather than a "personal" investment account -- a change from earlier studies, in which the use of "private accounts" or "privatization" drove down support."]

Is this guy crazy?

More on this later.