Bush Proposes Budget With $400B Deficit

Bush's going away gift to the nation:

The spiraling growth of Medicare and the high cost of renewing President Bush's tax cuts are squeezing popular education, health, housing and anti-poverty programs in the budget blueprint that he hands lawmakers Monday.

Even with difficult-to-digest proposals to curb Medicare costs and kill programs to repair dilapidated public housing, fund community action agencies and provide food to the elderly poor, Mr. Bush's $3 trillion budget will project deficits around $400 billion this year and next.

Mr. Bush's submission is already absorbing brickbats from Democrats castigating him for inheriting a government in surplus and leaving Washington with a budget deficit that is likely to break the $413 billion record set four years ago, once war bills and the cost of giving the economy a fiscal jolt with tax rebate checks are factored in.

"The next president is going to inherit a colossal mess because of the fiscal irresponsibility of this president," Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Budget Committee said Saturday.

Mr. Bush's budget will demonstrate a way to produce balance in four years and still renew tax cuts on income, investments and people inheriting large estates - cuts now scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. The cost of renewing those tax cuts exceeds $300 billion by 2013, according to congressional scorekeepers.