White House takes budget to skeptical Congress

here's the link to the article: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/06/bush.budget.ap/index.html

President Bush has brought his new $2.9 trillion dollar budget plan to congress, hoping to get it passed. The new budget would include a large increase in military spending while reducing, or abolishing funding for many social programs, such as social security and medicare. The Bush administration claims that the cuts in funding for the domestic programs, coupled with the projected revenue created by the economy will be enough to generate a surplus by 2012. Without having to raise taxes at all. The Democrats, however, are unconvinced. They claim that the projected surplus is based on overly optimistic assumptions of the performance of the economy. The Democrats have also pledged to reverse the budget cuts to domestic programs that were enacted under the republican led congress, so the likelihood of slashing social prgrams for the new budget is slim.

From an economic standpoint, it is difficult for me to see how the $244 billion deficit is ever going to go away without a significant raise in taxes. The administration is proposing a $2.9 trillion budget, with a boost of $245 billion to the Defense Department, and they propose to balance that out by cutting or reducing 141 social programs which will save $12 billion, and hoping the economy does really, really well in the next 5 years. I'm not a brilliant economist or mathematician, and i don't have access to the economic projections for the next 5 years, but spending $2.9 trillion and saving $12 billion and then hoping the economy performs as projected does not seem like sound economics. or good math. Especially when there is doubt about the truthfulness of the economic projections to begin with.