I am prepared to give credit where its due. I'm glad to see that George Bush is finally espousing some basic conservative fiscal policies. Hopefully this is not for show. His 2006 Budget contains some significant cuts in some domestic priorities. Some of the cuts are rather necessary, especially with regards to agricultural subsidies that are expensive and anti-free market; even some weapons programs that were considered untouchable are going to be cut. I applaud Bush for taking a stand on these issues; he's going after some very entrenched interest groups here. However he's not tying this to fundamentally needed tax reform like closing various tax loopholes. Again, this is a step in the right direction, but remember that Bush is also proposing partially privatizing the Social Security system, which is going to put us $2 billion in the red within 8 years. This isn't considering any economic downturns between now and then either. Otherwise the government is going to have to absorb the shock. But on the positive, Bush has defense and homeland security spending only going up by 2.1 percent, much less than the current rate of inflation. However this doesn't include the $80 billion dollar request he placed for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. After a long upward trend under Bush, discretionary spending is posed to go down 1% this year, if all goes well. Democratic opposition has been tepid, but they need to focus in on making sure that some basic educational and environmental programs that are effective remain intact. The Democrats will win if they can prove that a certain program works, and from there make it a difficult cut for the Republicans to promote politically. In order to return some fiscal sanity however, a lot of very tough choices on tax policy, entitlement spending, and discretionary spending are going to have to be made. I am glad to see that Bush is at least finally addressing the expansion of government and the perils of high deficit spending. However we know that talk is cheap at the end of the day. Lets see if he's willing to stand up to the Congress.