here is the FT article I was about to post....
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1073281468623<Out-of-control spending is the worry of the moment in Washington.
Congressional officials revealed last Thursday that recently passed reforms to Medicare, which include a prescription drug benefit, will cost around $540bn (?436bn, £298bn) over 10 years rather than the original $400bn.
This is an embarrassing revision just a couple of months after the bill was passed, though it is not a dramatic addition to a 10-year budget deficit that the Congressional Budget Office already conservatively estimates at $1,900bn. The White House says this budget is the one that will mark a turnround in both the deficit and the growth of spending.
Proposed overall discretionary spending - outside mandatory programmes such as Social Security and Medicare - will rise by 4 per cent. With defence rising by 7 per cent and homeland security by 10 per cent, this leaves less than a 1 per cent increase for the rest of the discretionary budget - including education, health, job training and employment, housing programmes and environmental protection.
Even within this total, budget experts say, some sectors such as education are likely to rise by more than 1 per cent, given Mr Bush's rhetoric about supporting education. This implies that elsewhere in the budget there will be big cuts.
Bill Beach, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation think-tank in Washington, says such cuts will have an important symbolic component. "The president has a political point to make which may be more important than the fiscal impact," he says.
Many conservative Republicans have been appalled by the rapid rises in federal spending in recent years. "By controlling spending on things like the EPA
and the Labor department, he can bring back angry Republicans into the fold," Mr Beach says.>
.....omg, this is frightening!