The arch-conservative Heritage Foundation take a look at the budget and
doesn't like what it sees:
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects a balanced budget by 2012. A number of CBO's assumptions underlying this projection are, to say the least, problematic. For example, CBO's projections assume that all of the President's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, as well as all other temporary tax cuts, are allowed to expire and that the Alternative Minimum Tax is not fixed before it digs further into middle-class incomes. CBO is also required by law to assume that there will be no more appropriations for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and for Gulf Coast reconstruction; that the pending reconciliation budget will have no effects; and that discretionary spending will not grow at all, in inflation-adjusted terms. With all these caveats in place, CBO's budget baseline is extremely unrealistic.
Funny how the Bush Administration trumpets numbers like the CBO's, but then works overtime to destroy the very premises that would make those numbers work -- like the expiring tax cuts and perpetual foreign wars. So while the CBO claims a balanced budget by 2012, Heritage figures the numbers will look like this:
The deficit will reach $394 billion in 2006;
$412 billion in 2007;
$428 billion in 2008;
$436 billion in 2009;
$458 billion in 2010; and
$805 billion in 2015.
While the deficits are a clear result of Bush's tax cuts, Heritage would rather see a different solution -- drastic spending cuts. But given the size of these budget deficits, cuts from the discrectionary budget won't do the trick.
In 2004, we had $895 billion in discretionary spending, including $454 billion in defense spending. That means that we had $441 billion in non-defense discretionary spending.
Our budget deficit in 2004 was $412 billion. So without raising revenues, our nation would literally have to eliminate the entire defense department (which ain't gonna happen) or its entire non-defense discretionary spending to simply balance the budget. That's not including the $4.3 TRILLION in debt we current hold and should really be trying to pay off.
Heritage knows this because its solution is much harsher -- cut social security, medicare, and medicaid entitlements.
We are seeing Grover Norquist's "drown the government" strategy in action.
But remember, we weren't in this mess before Bush irresponsibly cut taxes and engaged us in unecessary foreign entanglements.