John King: Budget numbers set up political battle

John King

CNN Senior White House Correspondent John King is at President Bush's vacation home in Crawford, Texas, reporting on the political impact of the latest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. King was interviewed Monday by CNN anchor Lou Waters.

WATERS: What do these numbers mean?

KING: They mean more intensity to the already intense budget battle that will greet the president and the Congress when they return from their August vacation.

The CBO numbers come from congressional sources. Both Democrats and Republicans project the government tapping into Social Security funds for $9 billion this year. The White House disputes that. Last week, the White House Office of Management and Budget put out projections of its own, which said there will be a very modest $1 billion dollar surplus when all the Social Security money is set aside.

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Now in the end, this really doesn't affect the budget. It doesn't affect Social Security benefits. Any money taken out of Social Security, if that happened, would be credited to the account. ... So more than anything else, this now part of political debate that will greet the president when he comes back and makes the case that this is all right, Washington just needs to restrain its spending. The Democrats say the Bush tax cut was too big, and the president left the government with too little to spend on key things like education and health care.

WATERS: John, because you say this is a political debate, the question is, who do we trust? As far as Democrats saying that the Bush administration may be raiding the Social Security trust fund, that's not quite true, is it?

KING: Well, it's tough to say, who do we trust. Now the government routinely tapped into the Social Security trust funds in the earlier Bush administration, even early in the Clinton administration. It was only in the big surplus years, near the end of Clinton administration, that there was enough money in Washington that the politician thought it was safe to wall off Social Security. It was a pretty appealing political promise. Now that the economy has slowed, there is a debate. And as for who do we trust, remember, the government takes in more than $2 trillion a year, about $2.2 trillion a year. It spends about 2 trillion of that.

So the fact that the OMB on the one hand, and the CBO on the other hand, those two agencies -- one aligned with the White House, one with the Congress -- are about $10 billion apart when it comes to projected. Remember, these are estimates, projected government spending. Most accounts would actually tell you, that's pretty close. Those estimates are pretty close to one another.

Who do we trust? We'll have a debate about that in September and October, as the Congress debates the budget.