Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

At yesterday’s press conference, President Bush was asked an interesting question:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. You talked earlier about the importance of spending discipline in the federal budget, but you went your entire first term without vetoing a single spending bill, even though you had a lot of tough talk on that issue in your first term. And I’m wondering, this time around, what are you going to do to convince Congress you really are serious about cutting federal spending? Will you veto spending bills this time?

There isn’t much wiggle room here — the President signed all the spending bills, which implies that he is as fiscally irresponsible as the rest of the Congress. His answer says exactly that.

THE PRESIDENT: Here’s — here’s what happened. I submitted a budget and Congress hit our number, which is a tribute to Senator Hastert and — I mean, Senator Frist and Speaker Hastert’s leadership. In other words, we worked together, we came up with a budget, like we’re doing now, we went through the process of asking our agencies, can you live with this, and, if you don’t like it, counter-propose.

And then we came up with a budget that we thought was necessary, and we took it to the leadership and they accepted the budget. And they passed bills that met our budget targets. And so how could you veto a series of appropriations bills if the Congress has done what you’ve asked them to do?

Now, I think the President ought to have a line-item veto, because within the appropriations bills, there may be some differences of opinion on how the money is being spent. But overall, they have done a superb job of working with the White House to meet the budget numbers we submitted, and so the appropriations bill I just signed was one that conformed with the budget agreement we had with the United States Congress. And I really do appreciate the leadership, not only of Speaker Hastert and Senator Frist, but also the budget committee chairman. I talked to Senator Gregg this morning, as a matter of fact, who’s running — he’ll be heading the budget committee in the United States Senate.

And we’re working very closely with members of Congress as we develop the budget. And it’s going to be a tough budget, no question about it, and it’s a budget that I think will send the right signal to the financial markets and to those concerned about our short-term deficits. As well, we’ve got to deal with the long-term deficit issues. That’s the issue that John Roberts talked about, which is the unfunded liabilities when it comes to some of the entitlement programs.

Bush admits that the current deficit is all within his budget proposals, therefore he and the Congress are responsible for the deficit. At least he didn’t mention 9/11 in there. All I see in his response is more of the same irresponsibility.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 at 9:13 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.