Only after the tax cut is passed will [Bush] turn his attention to his plans for Social Security, missile defense and Medicare. The budget blueprint, meanwhile, merely hints at where the money for those ideas will come from. By then, presumably, Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut will have avoided the fate of [Newt Gingrich]'s tax plan.

In the view of some budgetary experts, the Bush gambit runs the risk of being fiscally irresponsible. The budget plan rests heavily on 10-year projections that may never materialize. More than half of Bush's reserve fund for new initiatives, for instance, builds up after Bush would have completed a possible second term.

Bush's strategy, however, has put Democrats in a political bind. There is little in the Bush outline to directly attack this year in the coming appropriations process, while the 10-year projections contained in the plan are designed to suggest that there is more than enough money for the rest of Bush's agenda.