Bush's budget restraint is sleight of hand

While we're encouraged by President Bush's attempts in his budget announced Monday to rein in federal spending, we fear far too much of it is accomplished through sleight of hand.

A relatively small example, but one important to residents of Northern Nevada, is the attempt to divert some $700 million a year from sales of federal lands in Southern Nevada into the federal treasury.

Those proceeds are supposed to go toward a variety of educational, infrastructure and environmental projects, including protection of Lake Tahoe. Sen. John Ensign, who wrote the Southern Nevada Lands Act, along with Sen. Harry Reid, pushed hard to get it throughCongress to help Nevada deal with the vast tracts of public lands which dominate the state.

The land sales have been much more successful than anticipated, so millions more are being generated a year. Bush's budget proposes to take up to 70 percent of the proceeds.

But a deal is a deal. Nevada has struggled forever with the restraints of having 87 percent of its land under public domain. Now that development is rampant and land values sky high, especially in the Las Vegas area, the costs of growth are also rising rapidly. That money should go where it was intended.

Unfortunately, Bush's $2.57 trillion budget has much biggerproblems. It neglects to take into account significant portions of the cost of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his proposal to restructure Social Security and his planned future tax cuts - all of themcosting billions more against the bottom line.

For all his other conservative strengths, real fiscal restraint doesn't appear to be on Bush's agenda. It's hard to shake his hand for reductions in 150 programs when the other hand obviously is holding something behind his back.