Bush is proposing a 2.5 trillion dollar budget. Supposedly, this manages the following:

• it is the “president’s most austere budget to date”
• it pushes the US federal budget deficit to “a record $427 billion”, and “is the third straight year the Bush administration will have set, in dollar terms, a deficit high.”

Austere obviously doesn’t mean small or balanced. The most common meanings are “strict or severe”, or “bare of adornment”. I’m not sure how that applies to a budget with a $427 billion deficit. To put it simply: for every $4 the US government is bringing in, they’re spending nearly $5. I’ll be damned if I know what is strict about that.

The amazing thing is that it’s not just from the supposed “War on Terror”. From the same article: “Military spending may climb to $419.3 billion”. If the US disbanded their military, reducing defence spending to $0.00, the budget would _still_ be over $8 billion in the red.

And this is the party that runs on economic management credentials???