RALEIGH -- U.S. Rep. Brad Miller delivered the Democratic response after President Bush's weekly radio address Saturday, expressing skepticism at Bush's plan to boost education spending while freezing the overall budget.

"We Democrats are all for cutting wasteful spending," said Miller, who represents North Carolina's 13th District. "But last year, President Bush thought health care for veterans was wasteful spending -- and he put funding for education in that category, too. Last year, President Bush's budget cut the promised funding for No Child Left Behind by $9 billion. ... And he called for cutting drastically the main source of federal funding for occupational training in our community colleges."

Bush, facing heavy criticism from conservatives for the administration's growing budgets, called for new statutory limits on spending in his radio speech, The Associated Press reported.

"This simple step would mean that every additional dollar the Congress wants to spend in excess of spending limits must be matched by a dollar in spending cuts elsewhere," Bush said.

He did not say who would set the limits or how they would be enforced, AP reported. Unlike similar rules that governed Congress in the 1990s, Bush's proposal would not impose restrictions on new tax cuts.

Bush said he would virtually freeze many domestic programs, with an increase of less than 1 percent for domestic discretionary spending outside of military and domestic security, AP reported.

In his response, Miller said that Bush's planned tax cuts for the new federal budget will add to the nation's deficit, which doesn't help those who are unemployed.

"If President Bush thinks these are good times, I wish he'd been with me when I visited the unemployment office in Rockingham County, North Carolina," Miller said. "I expected to talk to workers who had just lost jobs at Pillowtex, a large textile manufacturer that closed its doors last fall. And I did. But I also talked to workers who had been out of work for two or three years and had been looking nonstop."