After delivering his statement with members of his Cabinet standing behind him, Bush walked away without taking any questions from reporters.

Later, in a White House news briefing, presidential spokesman Tony Snow was pressed to explain how Bush's budget-cutting pledge could be reconciled with the burgeoning costs of the war in Iraq, which is funded largely through emergency supplemental bills rather than the regular annual budget process. Those costs thus are currently not subject to overall spending limits and are excluded from deficit calculations. In a report last month, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended that war funding be shifted from supplementals to the regular budget to provide greater transparency.

Snow said Bush in his Jan. 23 State of the Union speech would "move toward making expenditures in Iraq and in the war on terror generally, including Afghanistan, as transparent as possible." The spokesman did not commit to complete elimination of supplementals for war funding and said he could not get into specifics on the administration's fiscal 2008 budget proposal, which is scheduled to be released Feb. 5.

Snow indicated, however, that Iraq war spending would be taken into account in the plan to balance the budget by 2012 -- three years after Bush leaves office.

[...]

Some economists also have charged that Bush has claimed unwarranted credit for his tax cuts, which they say have cost the Treasury more in lost revenue than has been gained from their economic stimulus effect.

According to Alan D. Viard, a former Bush White House economist who joined the American Enterprise Institute, "Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There's really no dispute among economists about that."

Viard said in October there was "no evidence" that Bush's tax cuts come anywhere close to paying for themselves, a conclusion shared by economists at the Treasury Department and the nonpartisan CBO, Washington Post staff writer Lori Montgomery [link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601121.html|reported].

The Congressional Research Service has estimated that economic growth fueled by the tax cuts is likely to generate revenue worth about 7 percent of their total cost, which amounts to about $1.1 trillion since 2001.