Hearings tomorrow 2/9/06 Thursday.

[TayTay]

Senate Finance Committee: In which an intrepid Dem hero gets to ream Sec. Leavitt of HHS a new one over the President's new budget, incluidng the plans for SSI. (Did anyone see the budget hearing last year and the exchanges between Sen. Kerry & Sec. Leavitt? OMG! JK basically called the budget a lie and LEavitt a stooge of the Bushie Lie machine. I loved it.)

The President’s Fiscal Year 2007 Budget Proposal

February 9, 2006 at 10:00 a.m. in 215 Dirksen Senate Office Building


Member Statements:
Charles Grassley, IA
Max Baucus, MT

http://finance.senate.gov/sitepages/hearing020906.htm


Panel

The Honorable Mike Leavitt, Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC

[TayTay]

1. And the Threat REduction hearing in SFRC (Thurs. 2/9/06)

New Initiatives in
Cooperative Threat Reduction
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HEARING
before the

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, February 9, 2006

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time: 9:30 AM
Place: 419 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Presiding: Senator Lugar

Witness:
The Honorable Robert Joseph
Under Secretary for Arms Control and
International Security
Department of State
Washington, DC

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2. You can listen to the budget hearings at this link.

http://www.senate.gov/~finance/sitepages/hearings.htm

This could be good.

From last year's hearing. (Tell me JK couldn't say the same thing this year.)

KERRY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, welcome. We appreciate you being here today, and this is obviously an area of enormous interest.

I heard some of the comments back in my office of the ranking member and others with respect to the specific amounts per state, and I know you're going to pursue that.

But let me just say that I have a lot of difficulty with this budget and with the proposal for a lot of different reasons. You've been a governor. You've balanced budgets. You know what honest budgeting is all about.

And I regret that the overall budget that's in front of us, I think, is significantly a shell game. Many people have pointed that out in different ways. But in the 22 years I've been here, it's one of the most inaccurate, almost dishonest, budgets that I've seen.

It doesn't cover the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn't cover Social Security. It doesn't reflect the permanency of the tax cuts, which is almost $1.6 trillion. I mean, none of this is in the budget.

There's almost $5 trillion of proposals that you guys are fighting for that aren't in the budget. So there's a different set of books, totally different set of books. It's sort of Enron-style accounting.

You've got a set of books over here for what you really want to do, and then something you present to us. I don't know why you didn't just present something that said you balanced the budget, because it would have been, in effect, the same thing.

Now, you have a proposal that you're calling Cover the Kids. Cover the Kids: implication, we're going to cover the kids in America. There are 11 million children without health insurance in America, correct?

[Mass]

3. Listening now - no Kerry yet,

Biden, Obama, and Nelson have spoken, and I dont like at all what Nelson and Biden are saying. It sounds like "We are tougher than * on Iran", not "we are smarter", and once again, Biden is attacking the Europeans as not being tough enough.

(no Feingold and Boxer either).

[TayTay]

4. I have the Finance Comm on

No Kerry yet either. The Dems and the Repubs thought are doing a good job of poking holes in the new budget proposal. No big things yet.

EDIT: Grassley just brought up the HSA's (Health Savigns Accounts.) Grassley finds them inadequate and Sec Leavitt says the Admin line that at least it give people a way to buy helath insurance. (But this way doesn't work. As Baucus pointed out, our Health Care system and the budget in general are 'Darwinism.')