Bush's deficit

[low_delta]

Despite President Bush's assurance in 2001 that his tax cuts "could happen without fear of budget deficit, even if the economy softens," the estimated $455 billion budget deficit this fiscal year will be the highest in U. S. history.

In the President's 2002 State of the Union message he tried to shift blame onto Congress, saying "our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term so long as Congress restrains spending,"3 but earlier this month he admitted his tax cuts account for 25% of the deficit.

The record-setting debt is at complete odds from the President's first year in office when he promised, "Many of you have talked about the need to pay down our national debt. . . I agree. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to act now."

Instead the Bush tax cuts will pass an extraordinary hardship onto the next generation that faces paying a minimum of $43 trillion in Social Security and Medicare benefits to Baby Boomers. Even if the government limited itself to paying only for retirement benefits, health benefits and interest on the national debt, federal taxes would still have to be raised by 70 percent - permanently - to meet those obligations.

http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df09302003.html

Comments

[specificocean.livejournal.com]

What does he care?

[dwivian]

And why is the debt so high? Because Congress passed budgets spending more than they have. The President can't spend money that Congress doesn't authorize, so the blame is never in his court. Had Congress stepped up to the plate and reduced spending appropriately, we'd be fine, but they continue to use the Treasury as a vote buying system. Always the way, it seems. We could be paying down our debt, and keeping our taxes low, if we just went through and eliminated lots of inessential services and redundant offices.

Oh, and measuring the deficit in terms of pure dollars is foolish. It must always be measured as a ratio to the actual value of the economy. For example, being $500 in debt when you only make $10,000 a year is significant. Begin in debt $1000 when you make $500,000 isn't so big a deal. As a percentage of the GDP, this deficit isn't horrible.

Of course, I'm opposed to ANY deficit, but that's the issue for Congress, again.

[low-delta.livejournal.com]

But the whole budget process is a problem. Congress doesn't have a say in teh President's budget package, they only get to approve or deny the funding, right? So either the president gets what he wants or congress is made to look like the bad guy.

As for the percentage measure, that sounds fair. So it's difficult to compare this deficit to the previous record highs, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to compare it to what it was three or four years ago.

And then there's the whole tax cut thing. He knew he had a war on, and could easily have rallied the people behind the cause. They would have been okay with giving up their tax cuts for the war. What part of the defecit could have been covered by the tax cuts?

But yeah, I think there a lot of spending that could be cut.

[dwivian]

Er....no.

The President submits a budget, and the Congress can toss the whole thing and write their own. And, in fact, they usually do this. The Presidential Budget is the 'pie-in-the-sky' one, generally, and Congress gets to rip it apart and make something that works. There has never been, to my knowledge, a Presidential Budget passed as submitted.

As to comparison to three years ago -- remember, that was the time when businesses were claiming profitability when they were really bleeding money, so they had to pay taxes on what they pretended to have. They also were paying lots of DotCom level salaries to geeks and middle management, and so lots of income tax was paid there, too. Only when it all fell apart did things revert to normal, except....

If you really WEREN'T profitable, you can revise your tax statement, pay the nominal penalty, and use existing "surplus" tax paid to offset the penalty and future tax owed. Thus we suddenly have a drop in collection of taxes below the current actual production levels because of overages from a few years ago. It's all ugly, when you get into it.

The tax cuts are necessary because you will never get spending to drop if income rises. The ONLY way to force the hand of Congress is to propose taking in less money (very popular) and then yell at them for the deficit (making them unpopular unless they can figure out how to get similar services for less money). All in all, a good political play.

Bush's Debt

[emschin.livejournal.com]

The spending for the war that Bush forced us into certainly didn't help. Congress did authorize that, but only after he put us in a situation where congress had no real choice.