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spending increases were for non Homeland/non-defense accounts.!!!
:-)
The White House prefers a different set of statistics. Excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush aides say, he cut spending 6 percent in 2002 and 5 percent in 2003, and 2 to 3 percent for 2004 -- this after a comparable increase of nearly 15 percent in these areas in the last year of the Clinton administration."The president has provided strong leadership to make sure we are doing what it takes to win the war on terror, our nation's highest priority, while holding the line on spending elsewhere in the budget," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said this week.
But when a White House official presented this analysis to a meeting he attended recently, "I nearly laughed out loud," said Heritage's Riedl. He calculates that 55 percent of all new spending in the past two years, or $164 billion of $296 billion, is from areas unrelated to defense and homeland security. Unemployment benefits are up 85 percent, education spending up 65 percent. "It's really an across-the-board thing," he said. This has led federal spending to top $20,000 per household in today's dollars for the first time since World War II -- a jump of $4,000 in the past four years.
Discretionary spending, which grew 2 percent annually during Clinton's presidency, has grown at 6.5 percent under Bush. And federal spending as a percent of gross domestic product, which decreased under Clinton, has edged back up to 20 percent under Bush.
(So Bush has the voters saying spend what you need to spend on the war - and Bush is running with this)... "People are upset about it, but they weigh it against what they consider to be Bush's leadership in Iraq and elsewhere. . . . They say, 'Well, we don't like this, but it's not enough to cause us to bolt.' "
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