By Fred Gaboury

If presidents are known by the priorities set forth in their budgets, the budget for fiscal year 2002 George W. Bush sent to Capitol Hill on April 9 reveals a president whose first priority is tax cuts for the rich to be paid for by cutting programs effecting working people, the poor and the environment.

Fearing public outrage and a backlash in Congress, Bush hid the details of the $1.96 trillion budget, which holds increases in total discretionary spending to 4 percent, until members of Congress had gone home for a two-week Easter recess.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said the budget "clearly reveals the cruel choices."

Bush had made and called the billion-dollar cut in the child Health Insurance Program at a time when 10 million kids lack health insurance, part of the "price tag" for Bush's package of tax cuts costing more than two trillion dollars.

"The proposed tradeoff - budget cuts in programs working families need and depend on in exchange for millionaire cuts - is a bad idea," he said, "and a bad deal for American workers and their families."

If Congress sustains Bush's budget, dislocated worker programs will be cut by 13 percent, adult training programs by more than 5 percent while funds for OSHA and the Wage and Hour Administration, both of which enforce the most basic of worker protections, will be frozen at present levels.

Overall spending on clean air, clean water, safe food, waste management and other environmental goals would decline, as would the federal contribution to mass transit projects. The budget also cuts money for cleaning up pollution from nuclear weapons production while, at the same time, adding money to restore the nation's capability to make nuclear bombs.

Discretionary spending - the money for programs that must be "authorized" by Congress every year as distinct from entitlement programs such as Social Security and interest payments - for 2002 amounts to some $661 billion of which more than half goes for military spending.

Bush admits that this year's budget cuts $12 billion in discretionary spending but, upon closer examination, his numbers get fuzzy.

The budget proposes increases in spending for the military, for education and other programs by a combined total of $260 billion over 10 years while total discretionary spending would rise just $30 billion during the same period. The budget orders cuts for several departments, among them agriculture, labor and the environment.

While many other agencies face cuts, military spending is slated to increase by nearly 5 percent - from $299 billion to $319 billion - not counting $14 billion for nuclear arms hidden in the Department of Energy budget and another $1.4 billion in other areas, bringing the total to $335 billion.

But these proposals are little more than a rough draft of a final military budget to be unveiled later this spring that will include money for stepped-up development of Star Wars and other military boondoggles.

Once these have been included in the budget, even greater reductions in social programs will be needed to maintain the overall 4 percent ceiling on discretionary spending.

Martha McSteen, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, charged that Bush's budget "greatly escalates" the danger of a shortfall in Medicare funding.

"It will cause the federal program providing health care to seniors and the disabled to become insolvent 15 years earlier than it would under current law," she said.

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said the budget, which leaves millions of women and children out in the cold, "literally shortchanges American health care by providing too little support and reaching too few people."

Gwendolyn Mink, author of Welfare End, says the combination of Bush's tax and budget proposals leaves millions of women and children out in the cold, with women and children of color its special targets.

"More than half of the three million African-American families with children and half of the three million Latino families with children will not benefit from either," she said.

Bush's claim that his budget increases discretionary spending for social programs is also suspect. What is overlooked is the fact that the 4 percent increase only applies to 2002 and will decline to 0.4 percent next year, a cut of at least $12 billion over the amount of money needed to maintain these programs at their 2001 level.

Bush justifies his priorities as the way to roll back "big government" by reducing the size of the federal budget which now represents about a fifth of the nation's gross domestic product, a considerably smaller proportion than in other industrial countries.

The 2002 budget would bring that figure down to 18.1 percent, to 16.6 percent in 2006 and to 15 percent by 2011, a level not seen since the end of World War II. By way of comparison, the federal budget was 43.7 percent of GDP in 1944.

The budget battle will continue on through the spring and early summer as some 13 appropriations bills wind their way through Congress and together determine the final shape of the expenditures in the 2002 budget as well as any tax cuts.