Bloated Bush budget.(Correction, Please!)(Correction Notice)

ITEM: White House Press Spokesman Scott McClellan made the following statement on February 7, after the president unveiled his fiscal 2006 budget: "I think if you look at the budget, it shows that we are exercising even greater spending restraint than we have in the previous few years. This is a responsible budget that funds our nation's highest priorities and keeps us on track to cut the deficit in half over the next five years."

ITEM: The lead sentence of a front-page story in the February 8 Boston Globe charged that "President Bush yesterday laid out a $2.6 trillion federal budget that would boost national defense while making the deepest cuts in social programs since the Reagan administration."

ITEM: A house editorial in the February 8 New York Times on the fiscal 2006 federal budget asserted: "The deficit problem is a reflection of lowered revenue more than high spending--a fact that the president and the Republicans in Congress are determined to ignore."

CORRECTION: All of the above statements are both patently false and deliberately deceptive. White House Spokesman Scott McClellan claimed that the Bush administration is "committed to deficit reduction" in his February 7 press conference after the release of the fiscal 2006 budget proposal to Congress. The Bush budget does show the deficit being reduced from an estimated $427 billion this year to $390 billion next year. However, the president's budget does not include his request for $82 billion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2006. If the $82 billion were included, the projected deficit for 2006 would be $472 billion, a record high.

A reporter, taking into account the war costs, pointedly asked McClellan: "So if you can just illuminate for us, if you're doing such a great job at restraining spending, why is the deficit projection higher for next year than it was for this year?" McClellan replied:

 
   Well you have to go back and look 
   at what we've been through over the 
   last few years.... I can go through 
   that again, but I think you've heard it, 
   everything that we've been through. 
   And we're in a time of war. You must 
   remember that, as well. And there 
   are important challenges that we 
   have an obligation to meet, first and 
   foremost, to protect the American 
   people, to defend the homeland from  ...