President George W. Bush's fiscal year (FY) 2006 budget punishes America's working families for his own misdeeds—his stubborn insistence on preserving and expanding tax breaks that mostly benefit America's wealthiest families. Unless checked by the U.S. Congress, the result of the president's misplaced priorities and irresponsible and unfair policies will produce enormous suffering for the most vulnerable of our citizens.

America's working families already are struggling to maintain living standards in a labor market that has not fully recovered from the last recession.

Instead of proposing a budget that will create and retain good jobs, make health care more affordable and build secure retirements, Bush wants Congress to make deep cuts in programs all Americans rely on and that provide an indispensable backstop of economic and health security for vulnerable children and seniors, the disabled and the poor. Rather than solving problems for America's workers and their families, the Bush budget makes these problems worse, further threatening economic security for families:

Bush's budget does nothing to restore eroding health care benefits for working families. Despite soaring health care costs for employers and workers alike and huge increases in states' Medicaid spending, the Bush budget does nothing to shore up employer-based health care, which serves roughly two-thirds of insured Americans, or to ease Medicaid burdens for the states. Instead, Bush wants to expand Health Savings Accounts, increasing workers' out-of-pocket health care costs, and to institute new health care tax credits, inducing even more employers to scale back coverage. Bush also calls for slashing Medicaid funding for states by $45 billion, imposing enormous new burdens, just as states are finally digging out of deep budget holes, and threatening health care for many, including poor seniors and the children of low wage workers. And under the Bush budget, veterans' health care funding will be more than 16 percent lower in 2010 than it is today.

President Bush and his administration rationalize this tough love approach to the budget as essential fiscal discipline designed to achieve deficit reduction. But in truth, the president's budget is more an exercise in fiscal fiction than in honest and disciplined fiscal stewardship. At the very moment Bush asks working families to make health care, education, retirement security and job training sacrifices, he willfully refuses to "discipline" the single largest culprit in our budget crisis—his millionaire tax cuts—and he willingly seeks to swell the nation's debt more, with proposals to extend tax cuts and to privatize Social Security. In fact, Bush does not even address the long-term costs of these two huge deficit drivers in his budget, or factor in costs of future operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, estimated to be at least $80 billion this year alone.

Real truth in budgeting and genuine concerns for fiscal stewardship would demand forthrightness absent from the Bush budget. A budget that leveled with the American people would tell them that:

First, President Bush's tax cuts are the single greatest reason for the nation's spiraling budget deficits. According to Congressional Budget Office data, the Bush tax cuts account for nearly half of the increase in the nation's deficit since 2001. The tax cuts' share of the deficit is three times larger than the share caused by new spending on domestic programs. Making these tax cuts permanent, as Bush proposes, will add $10 trillion to the deficit over 20 years.

Unlike the budget cuts Bush now wants, which fall heavily on low- and moderate-income Americans, the budget-busting tax cuts Bush has pushed through overwhelmingly benefit the nation's richest. In 2004, 60 percent of the benefit from the Bush tax cuts went to the 20 percent of households with average annual incomes exceeding $200,000.

Second, although Congress should address Social Security's funding problems, Bush's answer—privatizing Social Security—is a radical approach that will gut Americans' retirement security and cost the nation a bundle. Privatizing Social Security would require cuts in guaranteed benefits for all future retirees. Equally troubling for the nation's fiscal health, setting up private investment accounts would explode the deficit. Privatizing Social Security would add nearly $5 trillion in new national debt over the first 20 years the system is in effect, putting us deeper in hock to such foreign governments as China and Japan. Moreover, although President Bush claims privatizing Social Security would not affect workers or retirees older than 55, the budgetary strains resulting from privatization would create enormous pressure to raise taxes or cut spending—including spending on benefits for today's older workers and retirees.

The bottom line on President Bush's budget is that it punishes America's workers and their families for the president's own misdeeds—his stubborn insistence on preserving and expanding tax breaks that mostly benefit the very wealthy. The budget most hurts America's working families who can least afford cuts in programs we all rely on in order to preserve extravagant tax breaks for the wealthiest among us. And instead of putting the nation back on surer fiscal footing, Bush's budget policies and priorities will worsen the nation's financial situation.

We hope Congress has the courage and decency to reject the president's shameful attempt to pass the buck for budget problems to America's families and will instead place the blame and fix the solution squarely where it belongs—on the president's tax cuts. It is dishonest to blame budget problems on programs that serve all Americans when their greatest source is tax cuts that benefit relatively few. It is fundamentally wrong to balance the federal budget on the backs of children, retirees, the poor and people with disabilities in order to save tax breaks for millionaires.