Bush Veto Spending Increase

Bush today vetoed a bill for a fourth time-and for the third time it was a spending bill. Two of the previous occasions were about federal funding of stem cell research and one was a bill where the Democrats pretended to try to end the Iraq war (In reality they knew and hoped their "attempts" would fail). In the case of stem cell research funding, Bush did the right thing for the wrong reason while in the case of Iraq he did the wrong thing period. In this case he did the right thing for the right reason.

As Bush points, the Democrats plan to expand government health insurance coverage for children would actually redistribute from the poor. Poor children are already covered by Medicaid or the original plan, so only middle class households would gain. Meanwhile, the higher tobacco taxes designed to finance it would hit the poor disproportionally hard. It is also an unsustainable financing source since smoking is going down while the number of children covered by the program is going up, meaning it would likely expand the budget deficit.