What was that Bill Hicks comment about belt-tightening again?
President Bush's budget will propose slashing grants to local law enforcement agencies and cutting spending for environmental protection, American Indian schools and home-heating aid for the poor, The Associated Press learned today.
Bush molded the roughly $2.5 trillion spending plan for 2006 as a response to a string of record federal deficits, and is sends it to Congress on Monday.
Not included in the budget were early proposals to have each citizen of the United States mail the President a check for $300.
According to figures obtained by the AP, Bush would slice a $600 million grant program for local police agencies to $60 million next year. Grants to local firefighters, for which Congress provided $715 million this year, would fall to $500 million.
That'll teach those lousy pigs to support the other guy come election time. Good thing "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved," as John Ashcroft said in November.
Also gone would be assistance for police departments to improve technology and their ability to communicate with other agencies.
But boards with nails in them will still be freely available.
Luckily, our oceans will remain safe from the continued threat of al-Qaeda's massive dreadnoughts:
The Coast Guard - now part of the Homeland Security Department - will get $8.1 billion, $600 million over this year. Included will be a healthy increase for its plans to buy more oceangoing vessels, a boon to the new chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., in whose state many of the ships are built.
At long last, the shores of Pascagoula will be safe from the terrorist menace.
This next bit, from another story, might be my favorite part:
Move to raise the maximum Pell Grant for students from $4,050 to $4,550 over five years, or by $100 a year. Along with other changes, Bush's financial aid plan would cost about $28 billion over 10 years.
To help pay for it, the president would shrink subsidies the government pays banks to encourage them to make low-interest loans, and to the agencies that insure the loans for the lenders, education department officials said. He would also phase out Perkins loans, 673,000 of which were made to graduate and undergraduate students last year.
$4,550? Thanks a pantload, George. That $100 increase a year is roughly the cost of one biology textbook and a box of pens. Combine fewer loans with deregulated tuition costs (as we have here in Texas), and college degrees will soon be so expensive only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Apparently "no child left behind" doesn't count once they've left the realm of standardized testing.
Well, technically, when "they've left the realm of standardized testing", they're no longer children, thanks to that magical 18 year old cut-off.
You know the one. It's that marker that signifies a child--oops, I meant "adult"--is responsible enough to vote, get married and breed, and/or kill on a battlefield, but not consume an alcoholic beverage.
Anyone know off the top of their heads: (1) how much money was saved by slashing those spending programs; and (2) how much that amount is relative to a cost of a day/month/year for the war in Iraq?
The Bush budget for 2006 is now available - read it and weep. The Houston Chronicle has a decent summary. Pete provides a top-notch......
| --Posted to roman candles on Feb 7, 2005 12:47 PM:. |
Update: The congressional budget office estimates the 2005 expenses for the war in Iraq to be around $80 billion, give or take a few hundred million. Course, this amount ain't in the budget W just proposed.
But I'm still curious if anyone knows how much W's budget slashing amounted to.
I'll agree with you about the COPS program, a law enforcement cut not mentioned above, but that $600 million is actually the federal Byrne grant program, which funds hundreds of drug task forces nationwide like the one in the Tulia drug stings. These focus exclusively on busting users and small-time dealers, filling up prisons with low-level offenders without solving anybody's drug problem, and many engage in massive racial profiling. Though I'd rather see the money spent on drug courts and treatment programs instead, I support getting rid of the task forces.
If you look in the NYT story about the cuts to health programs, you will notice that abstinence education funding goes up again, while there are reductions in preventive medicine block grants.
Which I think basically sums up the Administration.