PressWatch

The topic of Bush's recent budget proposal was treated from different perspectives by a lot of media outlets. In fact, I had trouble finding multiple U.S. sources until I searched for them specifically. I found an AP article on the San Diego Union Tribune website sardonically entitled "Bush talks about fiscal responsibility at a company accused of price-fixing," which recounts a talk he gave Tuesday at a computer chip-making company. The article focuses more on the lawsuit the company recently settled. It doesn't explain the specific budget proposals except the part that gives the Pentagon $50 billion, which lead me to assume that computer chip manufacturers must stand to gain from that proposed funding in some way, no thanks to the reporter. The reporter quotes only this platitude from the President:

“The temptation in Washington is to spend your money on everything that sounds good. That's not how you run your family budget. That's not how this company runs its company budget and that's certainly not how the government ought not to run its budget.� Not sure if that double negative is the the fault of the writer or the Prez, but odds are it was all Bush.

An article from Texas' Star-Telegram speaks more directly about what the budget proposal portends in its headline, "Budget would be boon for N. Texas." The reader is then provided a list of bombers and other tsatskes the money would buy. I particularly appreciated this quote from Loren Thompson, defense analyst at the Lexington Institute (something to do with the Air Force, I think) for its smugness:

"The conclusion is clear," said Thompson. "Whatever the budget pressures from the Iraq war may be, they aren't slowing the investment in new weapons systems."

You have to dig deeply to find articles about the cuts in social spending the President includes in his budget proposal, cuts that will effect the poorest, as always, but increasingly the middle class, not to mention cuts to the public media outlets NPR and PBS.

In a related NPR article, which I heard Monday on "All Thing's Considered," the reporter gives us viewpoints about the U.S. economy, namely the income disparity. The reporter culled from several sources and pulled about equal info and quotes from each. The reporter begins with a vivid image of what separates the wealthiest 1percent from the rest of us:

"A small sign of that explosion of wealth at the top is the increase in private jet sales. They're the latest status symbol for the super-wealthy, and sales for the jets are rising nearly 30 percent a year."

The report then proceeds to let his sources describe the middle-class squeeze in a typical bourgeois section of Manhattan, the advantage gained by a dot-com company as an "example of how technology and globalization have supercharged the earning power of skilled and creative workers," and ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's assessment that funding education is a big key to maintaining a prosperous middle-class: "an effective, well-educated work force leads to investment, it catalyzes investment."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7190876
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20070206-1108-bush.html
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/16633267.htm