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Budget Cuts on Main Street
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
The Department of Labor in the Bush Years: A Damage Assessment
Rep. George Miller
Democracy and Elections:
Seven Ways Your Vote Might Not Count This November
Steven Rosenfeld
DrugReporter:
New Drug Survey Demolishes Drug Czar's Claims
Bruce Mirken
Election 2008:
Palin Pick Is GOP Hypocrisy at its Best
Laura Flanders
Environment:
Boatloads of Trouble: How We Are Importing Our Way to Destruction
Stan Cox
ForeignPolicy:
The Bush Administration Checkmated in Georgia
Michael T. Klare
Health and Wellness:
Earning Less and Dying Younger: How the Growing Strain on America's Middle Class Is Pummeling Our Health
Maggie Mahar
Hurricane Katrina:
From the Bayou to Baghdad: Mission Not Accomplished
Amy Goodman
Immigration:
Leader of Anti-Immigration Movement Calls Issue a "Skirmish in a Wider War"
Eric Ward
Media and Technology:
How the Media's Tarring of Hillary Hurt Obama Too
Eric Boehlert
Movie Mix:
Hollywood Gets Muslims Wrong, Again
Wajahat Ali
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
An Open Letter to Gov. Sarah Palin on Women's Rights
Lynn Paltrow
Rights and Liberties:
Amy Goodman: Why We Were Falsely Arrested
Amy Goodman
Sex and Relationships:
Why Do We Need to Talk About the Female Orgasm?
Susan Crain Bakos
War on Iraq:
The VA Continues to Abandon Returning Vets
Joshua Kors
Water:
Is California on the Brink of Environmental Collapse?
Rachel Olivieri
NEW YORK - Chief Joseph Estey in Hartford, Vt., won't be replacing the 15-year-old guns worn by his officers or buying new digital cameras for his police cruisers.
In New York, the Head Start program on the Upper West Side may have to start laying off staff members and eliminate the program for children with special needs.
In Seattle, the fire department, already constrained by a tight city budget, won't be getting federal funding to put more firefighters on each truck as it had hoped.
More than at any time in the four years of the Bush administration, Main Street will be feeling the impact of the federal budget if the president's spending plan is adopted.
From Altoona, Pa., where Amtrak stops, to the nation's congested airports, Americans could be looking at changes that will affect their everyday lives – everything from after-school programs to cotton harvests – as a result of bigger-than-normal cutbacks.
The Bush administration, for its part, argues that the reductions are needed to help keep the federal deficit – which, by its own estimate, will still hit a record $427 billion in fiscal 2005 – in check, while freeing up enough money to boost Pentagon spending and other select initiatives. Since almost 85 percent of the budget represents such items as interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the bulk of the cuts are coming in domestic programs.
The White House, of course, won't get all, or even many, of the cuts it wants, if history is any guide. Nonetheless, the proposed budget, as a starting point, is stirring concern in precinct houses and principals' offices across the country as another great lobbying war gears up over the nation's checkbook.
"If the cuts are put into place, the pain will be spread more broadly than in the past," says Stan Collender, an expert on the federal budget. "But I am sure they will not stand up."
In fact, many Americans would be right in feeling as if they were watching a television rerun. The president in past years has proposed budget cuts only to see Congress fund the programs anyway after intense pressure from groups facing the ax.
"This is a little like doing business in an Arab souk in Istanbul," says Bill Frenzel, a former Republican congressman, now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The president makes the first offer, they sip a little tea and make a counteroffer, then everyone goes for a walk before there are other counteroffers."
Yet this year is somewhat different because the president's economic advisers have warned him that the spiraling deficits may have ramifications for the U.S. dollar and interest rates. "He's not really been tough about the budget, but now he is," says Mr. Frenzel. "Like Reagan in 1981, he's trying to get Congress to slow down the rate of increase."
Many of the 150 programs scheduled for elimination by the administration have been to the brink before. That's the case with Amtrak, which under the president's proposal would lose its $1.2 billion in subsidy.
In 2003, the Bush administration budgeted $521 million for Amtrak and, last year, increased that amount to $900 million, half of what the company requested. Congress increased the subsidy to $1.2 billion on both occasions.
For Altoona, Pa., a mountain town where many residents travel by train to Pittsburgh, the subsidy is watched closely. "It [the budget proposal] is not going to do us any good," says Mark Geis, a city council member. "[We're] a train town."
Staff writers Alexandra Marks in New York and Kris Axtman in Houston contributed to this report, as did Robert Tuttle in New York.
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