NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Now that President Bush has been elected to a second four-year term, he is getting ready to take an ax to the budget that his policies helped push into a big deficit.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a story focused on proposed "consolidations" in job training programs college loans, local law-enforcement grants, and education -- all things that strike at the heart of middle class life.

Another target? Medicaid, the federal-state health-insurance program for low-income people.

Many people would agree with the notion that the government is often inefficient, duplicates efforts among various programs and could be "streamlined." It may be tough to convince those who opposed the President's tax cuts, and argue that they benefit the rich far more than the average working Joe or Jill, that it's now fair or sensible to balance the budget -- which was run farther into deficit by the war in Iraq and by those same tax cuts -- by cutting programs that benefit the middle class, and the poor.

The Prez is sure to answer that his tax cuts unleashed the dynamism that has fueled the last year or so of healthy GDP growth. It's going to be a tough sell.

The forces opposed to Bush's Social Security partial-privatization plan -- personal accounts for workers -- are already hammering him on the fact that the size of the tax cuts exceed the looming shortfall in Social Security funding.

Another interesting story in the New York Times on Sunday focused on the big cuts in farm subsidies the new budget proposes. Interesting, as the article points out, that the President pushed in 2002 for the farm bill which RAISED those subsidies and the NYT says, reversed six years of Republican efforts to rein them in. The problem with farm subsidies, critics say, is that they favor big agribusiness operations over the small farmer and have actually helped hasten the demise of the family farm. Can't help but wonder what leads the President to see the light on this now.

Or could it simply be that with his re-election now a done deal, he's less worried about losing support from constituencies, from the big agribusiness corporations, to the families that may be directly affected by his belt-tightening measures?

Whatever the reason, don't expect a resounding positive reaction from the financial markets just yet. Proposing an austere domestic spending budget is one thing. Getting it through Congress, where many members will face re-election in 2006, is quite another.

______________________________________

-- Kathleen Hays is economics correspondent for CNN and contributes to Lou Dobbs Tonight.