CNN Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics - Transcripts

CNN Just Woodruff's Inside Politics - Transcript

Senator, good to see you.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: Judy, nice to talk to you.

WOODRUFF: Senator, first of all, virtually everybody agrees that the federal government is spending too much money. Why-isn't the president going about reducing that spending in a responsible way?

SCHUMER: Well, the bottom line is it's very irresponsible and misleading. His two greatest priorities are permanent tax cuts and Social Security. And somehow just by coincidence the real bite of those programs, which create-which make the deficit even worse than it is, don't occur until 2009, starting when the president leaves office.

So they can say in the next year or two the budget is sort of flat, but the bottom line is, they're really pulling all sorts of tricks. If a private company did this, they'd be hauled before someone, the accounting board or the SEC or somebody or other.

WOODRUFF: Did any of the cuts the president is proposing make sense, the ones that you've had a chance to lock at?

SCHUMER: Well, you know, we do have to keep growth in. The problem is that the president has chosen one rather small part of the budget to put in all the cuts and it's either cynical because he knows they're so deep that Congress will restore them, or impractical.

Now are those cuts things that I could live with? Of course. For instance, he does deserve credit, in the past they have sometimes cut just urban programs, if you will, blue state programs and not cut agriculture. This time they have cut both. And the way they have cut agriculture is a way that I think makes sense, just giving some money to the small family farmers, not big agribusiness.

But overall, these cuts are so deep and so across the board, it's sort of the most meat-ax approach to at least discretionary spending that I've seen in the 25 years I've looked at budgets here on Capitol Hill as a House member and now as a senator.

WOODRUFF: Senator, is it really worth getting exercised about this president's budget cut proposals when we know last he proposed something like 65 programs? They eliminated-Congress only ended up eliminating four of those.

SCHUMER: Well, I think it does matter now more than ever because interest rates are hanging in the balance. The problem with interest rates is that our trade deficit requires the Fed to keep interest rates higher than they'd normally be.

And if interest rates-the prime rate goes up to 4 percent, it's now 2.5 it was 1.5 several months back, and if the economy begins to slow down, there's no give to stimulate the economy. In fact, the budget still sucks money out of the economy.

So not actually reducing the deficit is going to have real severe consequences, not in 2005 but in 2006. And playing this game is going to really hurt people.

WOODRUFF: Let me just name one of the specifics here. You have made an issue of Amtrak in the last day or so. The budget director, Josh Bolten, though, is saying Amtrak was originally set up 30 years ago to be a for-profit, self-sustaining corporate entity not intended to be run on federal government subsidies. He said the market needs to apply, you know, in railroads as everywhere else.

SCHUMER: Well, the bottom line here is he can try to do that by just pulling the subsidy out and the damage that will be is enormous. We subsidize our roads, the nickel gas tax and gasoline taxes pay for those. We subsidize our airports and for some reason only amtrak is supposed to totally go on its own and that's what the administration has done.

Now, if amtrak is to shut down October 1st, which it would do under this budget, it would not just affect New York and Philadelphia and Boston and Washington, the so-called Northeast Corridor, but everyone would then have to fly, the La Guardia Airport, Logan airport, National and Reagan Airports-I mean Reagan and Dulles would get so backed up that it would back up Chicago and L.A. and air traffic would come to a grinding halt.

These are irresponsible cuts, but when the president says he has to make his own tax cuts permanent, he has to borrow trillions to fix Social Security and he has to increase military spending, not just for the soldiers in Iraq, but while they've cut certain military programs, they haven't cut many others, we still are funding two planes. The F- 22 and the Joint Task Fighter, you know, it is both unfair, wrong and unrealistic. The most conservative Republicans in Congress won't make these cuts. WOODRUFF: Senator Charles Schumer of New York making a passionate defense on behalf of Amtrak. Senator, it's good to see you, thanks very much.

SCHUMER: Thanks, Judy. Nice to talk to you.

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