Slower Spending Just ‘Sanity,’ Bush Says

Opening his public campaign for approval of the $2.77-trillion budget he had sent to Congress 48 hours before, President Bush said Wednesday that his call to reduce spending on social services -- a central feature of his proposal -- represented necessary fiscal discipline and was not really a cut.

Bush said that the $65-billion reduction in entitlement programs, such as Medicare, would come from slowing the rate of growth.

“People call it a cut in Medicare. That’s not a cut,” he said.

“It’s the difference between slowing your car down to go the speed limit or putting your car in reverse,” he said -- an echo of an argument President Reagan made two decades ago when he too sought to bring down anticipated government spending amid objections that he was cutting social welfare programs.

Bush’s fiscal year 2007 budget, which faces months of debate by Congress and is certain to undergo House and Senate revisions, would increase spending on defense and domestic security and would reduce growth in social services and spending on some environmental protection programs, among others.

Bush spoke Wednesday to business executives assembled by the Business and Industry Assn. of New Hampshire, whose economically booming, tax-averse state has, the president noted, an unemployment rate of 3.5% -- roughly 25% below the U.S. average.

Later, on a day that underscored a strict fiscally conservative approach as he tries to regain his political footing, Bush signed a measure at the White House that demanded a nearly $40-billion cut in federal spending over five years.

The president and his allies have sought to present the new cuts he is seeking in the 2007 budget as a matter of setting priorities -- much, he said, as a family might want to travel on an exotic vacation each week, but must make choices on how it will spend.

Indeed, he used the word “priorities” 12 times in the 50-minute speech in New Hampshire. His message was summed up by a sign placed strategically for news cameras: “Funding America’s Priorities.”

Declaring that the government had to be “wise with your money,” he said: “Families set priorities. Individual Americans set priorities. Businesspeople set priorities all the time when it comes to setting the budget, and that’s what the federal government needs to do.”

He cited the cost of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the demands that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita placed on the federal budget as all the more reason to establish a spending order. “We’ve got plenty of money to spend in Washington. We just need to make sure we set our priorities,” he said.

In Washington, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) criticized the president’s account of the budget.

“The president today tried to put a high gloss on his harsh budget, but there’s no denying the fact that it will make life even harder for millions of Americans already struggling to put their kids through college and make ends meet,” he said in a written statement. “If you’re already wealthy, then this budget will make you wealthier. But if you’re a widow, orphan, or are disabled, you’ll see a cut in benefits.”

Bush encouraged Congress to press ahead with a newly invigorated effort to reduce its tendency to insert “pork” -- spending for specific programs in individual districts -- into the budget.

Efforts to rein in such practices, he said, are “a necessary part of making sure the budget process is rational.” He also pushed Congress to end, or “sunset,” programs that had lived beyond their usefulness or were not meeting their objectives.

“Get rid of ‘em,” he said, drawing attention to a government website, www.expectmore.gov, that rates federal agencies’ performance.

The president cited recent changes in Medicaid and student loan programs as examples of government efforts to improve efficiency, although others have criticized them as reducing the funds available for those in need.

The goal, Bush said, is “analyzation as to whether or not the programs are actually delivering results we want.”

The effort to bring down the growth in spending on social programs is part of the administration’s attempt to trim the federal budget deficit. Bush inherited a surplus when he took office five years ago.

The director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Joshua B. Bolten, has estimated that Bush’s spending plan will result in a $354-billion deficit next year, the fourth-largest in dollar terms.

Defending his plan to slow spending, Bush said the annual growth of Medicare spending was 8.1%. He said his budget would slow that rate to 7.7%.

“That doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me if you’re trying to bring fiscal sanity into Washington,” he said.

Bush has been out of Washington all but one of the eight days since he delivered his State of the Union address Jan. 31. For Wednesday’s speech, his first on the budget after sending his proposal to Congress on Monday, he chose a state that plays a central role in the budget process -- its senior senator, Republican Judd Gregg, is Budget Committee chairman -- and, with its first-in-the-nation presidential primary, in national politics as well.

Noting how politics permeates the state, he joked that he had trouble securing a location for his speech because senators were already “pre-booking for the ’08 elections.”