GOP in Congress unveils a budget

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans Wednesday proposed tax and spending plans for the U.S. government that would allocate more for defense, homeland security while trimming social programs to provide a tax cut.

While the budgets proposed by Senate Republicans and House Republicans differed in details, they agreed that the government must begin with rollbacks on federal social programs in order to cut the federal budget deficit in half — still more than $200 billion — by 2010.

House Republicans started a busy day of budget making on Capitol Hill by unveiling a blueprint for $2.57 trillion in federal spending next year.

Later in the day, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Judd Gregg, R-N.H., released a $2.6 billion budget package and declared that the present course of U.S. fiscal policy is "unsustainable" because "the government has made $44 trillion in promises we can't afford to keep."

Both the Senate and House plans would boost spending on national and homeland defense, but roll back the government's support for such endeavors as education, health care, job training, the national parks, and the environment.

The House Republican plan for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 calls for a cut of 0.8 percent in discretionary domestic spending, but provides a 4.8 percent increase in military spending and a 2.3 percent increase for homeland security, committee documents showed.

Using comparable numbers Gregg said the Senate Republican plan would recognize that the federal government's "first job is national security." The Senate would spend everything President Bush asked for in that area.

Bush also got a ringing endorsement through the budget for his proposal to cut a new range of taxes and to continue beyond 2010 the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 that are set to expire at the end of the decade.

The House plan included $106 billion in new and extended tax cuts that Bush requested for the next five years. The Senate GOP proposal called for a "quick consideration of $70 billion in tax cuts," but did not make clear exactly how much it would trim taxes over the next five years.

The House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, said the "choices were tough," but needed to fulfill the president's promise to cut the federal budget deficit in half by 2010.

"I don't think it's an overstatement to say we're facing an unprecedented challenge to our resources, including reducing the deficit," Nussle said.