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Touring a struggling job-training site, Democrat John Kerry on Friday sought to refocus the presidential race on pocketbook issues, warning of “almost criminal” cuts in bedrock training and education programs. “I’m tired of talking about valuing families and not valuing families,” Kerry said. “There are unbelievable, unacceptable, staggering numbers of young lives that are being abandoned in our country.” Kerry held a town hall meeting at a job-training site where officials said their budget and the number of students they can train have been slashed because of cuts. “This is pretty simple. The workplace of the United States of America...

CHICAGO (AP) -- Touring a struggling job-training site, Democrat John Kerry on Friday sought to refocus the presidential race on pocketbook issues, warning of "almost criminal" cuts in bedrock training and education programs. "I'm tired of talking about valuing families and not valuing families," Kerry said. "There are unbelievable, unacceptable, staggering numbers of young lives that are being abandoned in our country." Kerry held a town hall meeting at a job-training site where officials said their budget and the number of students they can train have been slashed because of cuts. "This is pretty simple. The workplace of the United...

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has accused President Bush of shortchanging the nation's veterans by cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs budget, increasing many veterans' health care costs and excluding thousands more from the system altogether. The facts are a bit more complicated. Kerry has repeatedly accused Bush, for example, of cutting the agency's budget. "This president is breaking faith with veterans all across the country," he said at a Democratic presidential debate in January. "They've cut the VA budget by $1.8 billion."

Theresa Anderson has lived on the street, and she wants never to go back. If you haven't been homeless, it is difficult to imagine how frightening the Bush administration's proposed cuts in the nation's principal housing assistance program are to people like Anderson who depend on housing vouchers. "Without housing help, I wouldn't have been able to get back on my feet," Anderson said. "There would have been no way to get a roof over my head." President Bush's fiscal 2005 budget calls for cutting the voucher program by more than $1.6billion next year and $4.6billion by 2009. That's 30...

Fiscal restraint often goes out the window in election years as politicians create new programs and expand entitlements to send home the bacon. The Bush administration, however, has taken on constituencies and politicians of both parties by producing a budget that proposes to eliminate 65 federal programs even as the president threatens to veto a big-spending transportation bill. To George W. Bush's critics on the right, still angry about his signing of the 2002 farm bill, adding a prescription-drug entitlement to Medicare, proposing to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by 15 percent, and not once...

Some military voters may abandon Bush President might be losing support among veterans, service members and their families By WILLIAM DOUGLASKnight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON — When the Bush campaign asked James McKinnon to co-chair its veterans steering committee in New Hampshire — a job he held in 2000 — the 56-year-old Vietnam veteran respectfully, but firmly, said no. “I basically told them I was disappointed in his support of veterans,” said McKinnon, who served two tours in Vietnam with the Coast Guard. “He’s killing the active-duty military. ... Look at the reserve call-ups for Iraq, the hardships. The National Guard...

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS FROM: GARY SCHMITT SUBJECT: Cut Defense?  If congressional “budget hawks” have their way, there will be cuts made to the Bush administration’s defense spending package. Last week, the Republican-controlled Senate Budget Committee voted to slice $7 billion from the Pentagon’s FY 2005 budget. The ostensible reason for the reduction is the large federal deficit. With the national defense budget authority up by nearly $90 billion since 2001, the presumption is that there is room to cut. But this is not the case. Adjusted for inflation, the $423 billion in defense budget authority requested for FY 2005 is only 15% more...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The tax cuts and other policies President Bush proposed in his $2.4 trillion budget would probably have a minimal impact on the economy, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday. In its annual report on the president's budget, the agency that provides fiscal analysis for lawmakers said Bush's proposals could either increase or reduce economic output through 2009, and improve it in the following five years. "However, the differences are likely to be small, affecting output by less than one-half of one percentage point on average," the study said. The conclusion by the budget office comes in...

Military veterans have already played a prominent role in the 2004 presidential campaign, helping to propel one of their own -- Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts -- close to the Democratic nomination. If he is the nominee, Kerry is counting on strong support from his fellow veterans in the general election battle against President Bush.

President Bush's budget would produce deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projected Friday in the first authoritative look at the plan's longer-range implications. The forecast, $737 billion worse than the budget office expects should Congress ignore Bush's tax and spending plans, is sure to factor into this year's presidential and congressional campaigns. Bush sent lawmakers a $2.4 trillion budget for 2005 on Feb. 2, but it projected outward for only five years. The White House argues that longer-range forecasts are guesswork, but Democrats say the administration wants to hide later deficits that will career...

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites)'s budget would produce deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites) projected Friday in the first authoritative look at the plan's longer-range implications. The forecast — $737 billion worse than the budget office expects should Congress ignore Bush's tax and spending plans — is sure to factor into this year's presidential and congressional campaigns. Bush sent lawmakers a $2.4 trillion budget for 2005 on Feb. 2, but it projected outward only for five years. The White House argues that longer-range forecasts are guesswork, but...

John Kerry -- running in part on his record as a Vietnam veteran -- insists President Bush -- "[has] not kept faith with veterans across the country, and one of the first definitions of patriotism is keeping faith with those who wore the uniform of our country." Kerry specifically accuses the president of cutting the Veterans Administration budget. But, in fact, that funding is now higher than at any point in the past ten years, and it's going up twice as fast under President Bush than under President Clinton. What's more, according to the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy...

‘Everything on table’ GOP plans cuts, reforms, to tackle budgetary woes By Alexander Bolton and Sam Dealey House Republicans hope to enact a host of measures aimed at curbing what both centrist and conservative lawmakers decry as runaway federal spending. Emerging from a rare members-only “mandatory” two-and-a-half-hour conference called yesterday to deal with mounting budget concerns, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told reporters: “Nothing is sacred in this business. Everything is on the table.” Although Hastert didn’t say so, several initiatives under consideration would curb the power of the Republican leadership as well as House appropriators and authorizers. These initiatives...

William Niskanen is a fiscal conservative of the first rank, a lifelong advocate of government parsimony. His doctorate in economics is from the University of Chicago, the pantheon of conservative economic thought. He was an economic adviser in the Reagan administration. He now is chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. In short, he is a devoted believer in the mantra of lower taxes and smaller government. Yet now, in a painful twist of political stereotypes, Niskanen is so perturbed about President Bush's proposed $2.4 trillion budget that he speaks the seeming unspeakable when asked whom he would...

<p>Some Republican voters are beginning to ask if having a liberal Democrat in the White House with a Republican majority in Congress is the only way to restrain federal spending.</p> <p>Many fiscally concerned Republicans concede they now long for a return to the days of gridlock, when one party controlled at least one house of Congress, while the other party occupied the Oval Office.</p>

<p>During the Reagan years, conservatives were willing to live with big spending. What's changed?</p> <p>Unlike most families, the federal government can perpetually spend more than it takes in and still remain fiscally sound. That's because unlike us mortals, Uncle Sam isn't going to retire. His income isn't going to top off in middle age and slip in his golden years. The occasional but short-lived downturn notwithstanding, it will continue to grow with the economy, forever.</p>

George W. Bush Angers Conservatives Howard Dean isn't the only presidential candidate suffering a self-inflicted meltdown. There's a certain Republican with the same problem, and we don't mean Wesley Clark the former Reaganite. President Bush has so angered his conservative base by spending more than any Democrat in history and pandering to illegal aliens that Republican congressmen, stunned by constituents' complaints, met privately with Karl Rove to unload, the Washington Times revealed Friday. "I would say 97 out of 100 of our members who asked questions laid into him pretty good about spending and the lack of discipline on the...

Budget Director Joshua Bolten has privately issued an unprecedented challenge to unhappy conservative Republicans in Congress: Go ahead and cut President Bush's domestic budget if you can. We won't oppose you. Bolten addressed GOP lawmakers assembled in Philadelphia just before the budget was released. Conservatives grumbled that Bush's proposed increase in discretionary domestic spending of only one quarter of one percent was bogus, because its reductions in popular programs never will pass Congress.

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) --On the same day a poison-laced letter shuttered Senate offices, President Bush asked Congress to eliminate an $8.2 million research program on how to decontaminate buildings attacked by toxins.</p> <p>Buried in documents justifying Bush's 2005 budget proposal released Monday is an Environmental Protection Agency acknowledgment that his proposed cut "represents complete elimination of homeland security building decontamination research."</p>

<p>Congress is likely to restore the cuts in funding for local emergency services that President Bush had proposed in his 2005 budget, despite the pressure to control spending, said Republican lawmakers and congressional aides yesterday.</p> <p>In all, the budget of the Office of Domestic Preparedness — the "one-stop shop" that now dispenses almost all federal homeland security funds destined for state and local governments and responders — has seen its budget cut by about $800 million or just under 20 percent.</p>