WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush, poised to submit his new budget to Congress next week, warned Saturday that unless programs like Medicare and Social Security are changed, future generations will face tax hikes, government red ink or huge cuts in benefits.
Controlling spending requires the government to address the unsustainable growth of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Bush said in his weekly radio address. He said spending for the programs is growing faster than inflation, faster than the U.S. economy and faster than taxpayers' ability to pay for them.
"Unless we act, we will saddle our children and grandchildren with tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded obligations," Bush said. "They will face three bad options: huge tax increases, huge budget deficits or huge and immediate cuts in benefits."
The budget Bush submits on Monday for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 will start a new debate with the Democratic majority in Congress.
Reining in government spending will be one theme of Bush's remarks Saturday to the House Democratic Caucus meeting in Williamsburg, Va.
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The president said his top budget priorities continue to be keeping America safe and winning the war against extremists.
Bush will ask for $100 billion more for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year and seek $145 billion for 2008, a senior Pentagon official said Friday. Those requests come on top of about $344 billion spent for Iraq since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats are committed to giving U.S. troops everything they need, but he stressed that real change is needed in Iraq.
"America has already spent almost $400 billion on this war, too much of which has been wasted on boondoggles like Olympic-sized swimming pools in unused multimillion-dollar training camps in the desert," said Reid, D-Nev. "The American people deserve better. New reports by the Congressional Budget Office and our nation's intelligence community make clear that the president's policies in Iraq are flawed, costly and unsuccessful."
The president also called on Congress to pass the line-item veto, which would give him the ability to cut certain provisions in spending bills without vetoing entire measures. And he urged lawmakers to restrain government spending by reducing the use of earmarks _ a common Capitol Hill practice of slipping pet projects into spending bills.
To address the growth of entitlement programs, Bush's budget proposal contains about a 1 percentage point cut in the rapid growth in Medicare to squeeze about $66 billion in savings over five years from the federal health care program for the elderly.
Democrats argue that while Bush says he's proposing cuts to entitlement programs to address long-term solvency problems, he is not dealing with the cause: spiraling health care costs.
Karen Davenport, health policy director for the Washington-based Center for American Progress, said Medicare provides economic security for people who cannot acquire health insurance on their own. Fifty percent of people with Medicare coverage have incomes below $20,000 a year, and nine out of 10 Medicare beneficiaries have at least one chronic health problem, she said.
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"As he proposes $70 billion in cuts to these programs, President Bush will say that he is trying to address long-term financial problems in these programs," Davenport said. "He is trying to treat a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is that health care costs in the United States are out of control. The president hasn't offered any meaningful solutions for controlling health care costs."
White House budget director Rob Portman said Friday that Bush's plan will result in a budget surplus in 2012. That's assuming strong growth in tax revenues, continued cuts on domestic agency spending and other cuts to farm programs, Medicare and the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled.
Bush proposes to curb payments to health care providers, such as hospitals, and require more higher-income recipients to pay greater premiums.
