Kerry Vows Budget Restraint

John Kerry says if he's elected president, he will cap government spending – even if it means cutting some of his own programs.

"When I say a cap on spending, I mean it," the Democratic presidential contender said in a speech Wednesday at Georgetown University. "We will have to make real choices – and that includes priorities of my own."

Kerry said he won't let government programs outside of security and education grow beyond the rate of inflation. He said that with the growing deficit, he'd have to "slow down" some of his campaign promises or phase them in over a longer period.

He cited proposals for early childhood education and a program that would have provided tuition to students attending state colleges in exchange for two years of national service, although he didn't say how much they would be scaled back.

Kerry's appearance at Georgetown was billed as a speech on his economic policy, but it was largely an indictment of President Bush's stewardship over the national deficit.

Kerry said that unlike Mr. Bush, he will pay for all of his programs and he will cut the deficit in half in four years. The president has made the same promise but, Kerry said, "his record shows that we can't trust what he says."

"A deficit-reduction promise from George W. Bush is not exactly a gilt-edged bond," Kerry said. "If he continued in the presidency and performed as he has in the past, a third Bush term could mean a third Bush recession."

Earlier Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Don Evans offered a critique of the Kerry proposals on behalf of the Bush campaign.

"The last time America experimented with the policies like the ones Senator Kerry advocates were in the 1970s, and most of us remember that those weren't the best of times," Evans told the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

"When I hear Senator Kerry and the economic naysayers, the image that comes to mind is of President Carter sitting in the White House blaming the state of the economy on 'malaise.' What they fail to realize is that this is a growing economy in which we must foster job growth and opportunity, not close it off,'' Evans said.

Kerry has yet to offer a detailed budget that explains how much he is spending on his campaign promises and where he will get the money to pay for them.

In his speech, Kerry promised to work with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The two men have co-sponsored a bill that would create a commission that would recommend budget cuts and submit them to Congress for a yes-or-no vote with no amendments to keep pet projects.

"John McCain can't get anyone in the Bush White House to listen to our proposal," he said. "If I'm president, John McCain will get the first pen when I sign this bill into law."

Also Wednesday, Kerry criticized the Bush administration's decision to set the June 30 target date for transferring sovereignty back to the Iraqis and said Mr. Bush has yet to explain to whom power in Iraq would be delivered.

"You don't set an arbitrary date for the transfer of power to a non entity. You have to make the judgment of stability. I mean, this date it, appears to me, may well have been set by the American election, not by the stability of Iraq," Kerry said in an interview with American Urban Radio.

"Where are the people with the flowers, throwing them in the streets, welcoming the American liberators the way Dick Cheney said they would be?" Kerry said. "This is one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life."

President Bush is off the campaign trail at his Texas ranch through Easter Sunday. He was briefed Wednesday on the spiraling violence and U.S. casualties in Iraq where American forces are facing the heaviest fighting since the fall of Baghdad a year ago.

The president also spoke by telephone for 30 minutes with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his closest ally in Iraq. The two leaders will meet in Washington late next week to discuss Iraq and other foreign policy problems.