Highway, Medicare drug spending may get second look
By Associated Press
Published September 19, 2005
WASHINGTON - House Republicans are looking at delaying some federal spending, including money for a prescription drug benefit under Medicare and thousands of highway projects, to offset the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast, a leading GOP fiscal conservative said Sunday.
Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said there is a need for dramatic spending cuts in "big-ticket items."
However, Democrats appearing on Sunday news programs questioned how President Bush can trim the budget to pay for Katrina recovery and support tax cuts for the wealthy.
"Where is he going to find roughly half a trillion dollars over the next several years for Iraq and for Katrina?" Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked on Late Edition on CNN. "I think we're not leveling with the American people."
Raising taxes or not making permanent the president's tax cuts is not the answer now, said Pence, head of the Republican Study Group, the spearhead group for the GOP's most conservative members. "We simply cannot break the bank of the federal budget," Pence told ABC's This Week .
The drug benefit program, set to begin Jan. 1, is expected to cost $40-billion a year. Last month President Bush signed a $286.4-billion highway bill that has been criticized for including about 6,000 projects added by lawmakers to benefit their districts and states.
Clinton criticizes relief effort by administration
WASHINGTON - Former President Bill Clinton, asked by President Bush to help raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, offered harsh public criticism of the Bush administration's disaster-relief effort on Sunday, saying, "You can't have an emergency plan that works if it only affects middle-class people up."
On ABC News' This Week , Clinton argued that lower-income Americans had done better under the economic policies of his administration than they are doing now, and said the storm highlighted class divisions in the country that often played out along racial lines.
"It's like when they issued the evacuation order," he said. "That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. ...
"This is a matter of public policy," he said. "And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the '80s; that's what they've done in this decade. In the middle, we had a different policy."
Also ...
HOSPITALS DESTROYED: A hospital accreditation official says New Orleans' health care facilities have been shattered to an extent unmatched in U.S. history and some of its hospitals are probably damaged beyond repair.
RELIEF SCAM ALLEGED: The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles County announced the first federal charges involving an alleged Hurricane Katrina relief scam. Two people accused of posing as American Red Cross volunteers took in as much as $2,000, prosecutors say.
