Budget indicators

Bush's proposed fiscal 2008 budget would provide another big boost in spending for the war and overall defense and diplomatic spending. The budget plan includes $623 billion for the military next year, including $141 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a $50 billion down payment on the president's plan to permanently increase the size of the armed forces by 92,000 over the next five years.

-- Washington Post,
Feb. 6, 2007

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...Bush signaled he would attempt to squeeze spending on health care, education, housing and other domestic programs ....

The new Bush budget would also seek to reduce the rapid rate of growth in Medicare and Medicaid, trimming $101 billion from the two programs over the next five years by reducing payments to health-care providers and forcing wealthier seniors to pay more for physician services and prescription drug coverage.

... the president is seeking an 18 percent reduction in funds to provide heating assistance to 5.6 million low-income families, ...

-- Washington Post,
Feb. 7, 2007

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This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

-- Martin Luther King,
April 4, 1967