WP: Bush Signals Budget Accord

New Plan to Mirror Democrats' Goals

Thursday, January 4, 2007; A01

President Bush promised yesterday to produce a plan to balance the federal budget in five years and challenged lawmakers to slash their special pet projects in half next year, embracing priorities of the new Democratic leadership that will assume control of Congress today.

Appearing in the Rose Garden with his Cabinet, Bush said he has been encouraged by meetings with Democrats and thinks they can reach common ground on spending issues that have bitterly divided them for six years. He said that the budget proposal he will make Feb. 5 will erase the deficit by 2012, and he called on Congress "to end the dead-of-the-night" process in which earmarks are slipped into spending bills.

The president's announcements were greeted by Democrats as "me-tooism," as one senior leadership aide put it, that closely tracked goals outlined by the new majority. The incoming House and Senate budget committee chairmen have set 2012 as a target for balancing the budget, and the incoming House and Senate appropriations chairmen have decided to freeze earmarks this year and introduce further restrictions on such spending items, which are often called pork.

In trying to adopt such ambitions as his own, Bush hopes to regain the initiative after his party lost Congress in November and to counter his reputation as a president who took a budget surplus and turned it into record deficits, analysts said. Bush has never proposed a balanced budget since it went into deficit, never vetoed a spending bill when Republicans controlled Congress and offered little objection to earmarks until the issue gained political traction last year.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/03/AR2007010300235.html

.. towards the balanced budget Bush sez he supports.

Social Security could be made much more solvent by removing the cap on allowable taxible earnings.
Medicare could become the basis for Universal Health Care (Krugman's idea).
Etc., etc.

:rofl:

This should be good. I can't wait!