Dean: Big deficit suits Republican's plans

Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean accused Republicans on Thursday of running up the federal budget deficit so they can undermine the fiscal underpinnings of Medicare and Social Security.

"I think their principal motivation is to undo the pillars of the New Deal, particularly Medicare and Social Security, by making the budget deficit so big that those programs can't be sustained," he said at a lunch with USA TODAY and the Gannett News Service.

Republican spokeswoman Christine Iverson said fighting terrorism has fueled the deficit and called Dean's remark "disturbing."

In an economic plan he released Thursday, Dean made balancing the federal budget a top priority. He argued that fiscal discipline would help create jobs and restore cuts in government aid. But he didn't list specifics on how he'd balance the budget.

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To Norquist, who loves being called a revolutionary, hardly an agency of government is not worth abolishing, from the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration to the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts. "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."