Just four years ago, an $87 billion dollar budget surplus padded America's coffers. Now, a terrorist attack, two wars, two foreign occupations and a continuing War on Terrorism later and we've racked up a record $500 billion deficit. While both parties play up their policy strengths in this election year, for the American people who pay the bills, it's where the dollars go that count. The Bush administration's new budget plan aims high: to cut the deficit in half in five years while making tax cuts permanent and increasing defense spending. Do the numbers add up?

• The cost of tax cuts since 2001 is more than all defense, anti-terrorism and public programs combined
  
  
• Cutting the deficit in half means slashing the equivalent of twice the entire veterans budget, twice the entire education budget or fourteen times the environment budget

Discretionary spending is only one third of the national budget. Yet, it's burdened with the cost of everything from health care and education to military spending. With defense and security taking the biggest bite of the pie, and rising this year by 7% and 10%, respectively, domestic programs have found themselves on the chopping block. In his budget plan, President Bush will ask Congress to:

• increase funding to the No Child Left Behind Act by $1 billion - it is currently $7 billion under funded
  
  
• make a $1.5 billion investment in the Healthy Marriage program for advertising campaigns aimed at low income people, to teach couples how to manage conflict and for marriage mentoring programs
  
  
• spend $120 billion to explore Mars and the moon
  
  
• end 65 major programs, including public housing and an advanced technology program for businesses
  
  
• cut Medicaid, veteran's benefits, and child nutrition programs

Recent surveys reveal that 82% of us oppose cutting domestic programs while 76% support repealing the tax cuts to pay for the Iraq War. And, Americans are waking up to the splash of a $318 billon national debt interest payment circling the drain that will drown more domestic options each year.

In spite of a "recovering" economy, unemployment remains high, shutting out many new entrants to the job market. Wage gaps continue to unfairly penalize the pay of millions of Americans.

• For each $1 a man earns at the same job, White women are paid 74¢, Black women 63¢, Hispanic women 54¢- costing the American family an average of $4000 a year in gender based wage inequities
  
  
• If women earned equal pay for equal work, the poverty rate for single working mothers would be cut in half - from 25.3% to 12.6% and the poverty rate for married working women would drop from 6.3% to 1%

Will Congress slash federal programs that states depend on? Should the people have a more direct say about where how government spends our tax dollars? What does a healthy budget plan look like?