WASHINGTON – Fresh off a summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush yesterday tried to build support for his budget and tax cuts, which he’ll formally present to Congress on Tuesday.
Bush said his budget is “the size of a big-city phone book and about as hard to read from cover to cover,” but he said the “most important” number in it is $5.6 trillion – the size of the debt Bush says he can erase over 10 years.
The president will present his budget to Congress in a nationally televised speech Tuesday night, his first major address since the inauguration.
Congress is expected to debate for months Bush’s $1.6 trillion tax-cut proposal.
“My plan returns about one out of every four dollars of the surplus to the American taxpayers, who created the surplus in the first place,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.
“A surplus in tax revenue, after all, means that taxpayers have been overcharged. And usually when you’ve been overcharged, you expect to get something back.”
Democrats haven’t unified behind a single alternative tax-cut package, but they contend Bush’s plan to cut all marginal income-tax rates is too skewed to the rich, and they’re pushing more “targeted” tax cuts.
“A fairer way of approaching tax cuts is not to ask who pays more, but who needs the relief more?” Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack said in the Democratic radio address yesterday.
Bush assailed that approach, saying that, under his plan, “everybody who pays income taxes will receive a tax cut. Nobody will be targeted in, and nobody will be targeted out.”
He claimed the typical family would get $1,600 in tax relief.
On the spending side of his budget, Bush said education is his priority. That includes mandatory testing of students, with rewards for schools that improve and consequences for those that don’t.
The most controversial aspect is his education plan to give poor parents publicly funded vouchers to send their kids to private schools if their public schools are failing.
“Education gets the biggest percentage increase of any department in our federal government. We won’t just spend more money on schools and education, we will spend it responsibly,” Bush said.
“We’ll give states more freedom to decide what works. And as we give more to our schools, we’re going to expect more in return by requiring states and local jurisdictions to test every year. How else can we know whether schools are teaching and children are learning?”