George W. Bush campaigning in 2004
George W. Bush promised during the 2004 campaign to cut the budget deficit in half during his second term.
Bush may keep that promise.
But in a bizarre and fantastical way.
Something costs billions? Trillions? Put it off-budget, and viola!, the man who destroyed our nation's budget surplus becomes a fiscal hero to anyone who hasn't figured that Bush and his cronies are con-men.
From the New York Times ("In Plan to Reduce Deficit, White House Turns to Old Projections" by Edmund L. Andrews, Jan. 2, 2005):
As in past years, the budget will exclude costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could reach $100 billion in 2005 and are likely to remain high for years to come. The budget is also expected to exclude Mr. Bush's goal to replace Social Security in part with a system of private savings accounts, even though administration officials concede that such a plan could require the government to borrow $2 trillion over the next decade or two.
More below...
The New York Times
continues:
Among the costs that are expected in the five years after 2009 are nearly $1 trillion to make Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent, nearly $500 billion for the new Medicare prescription drug program and at least $400 billion to address widely acknowledged problems with the so-called alternative minimum tax.
Many analysts are dubious about the long-term plan. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that deficits will remain well above $300 billion if Mr. Bush's tax cuts are made permanent and if Iraq war costs taper off gradually. On Wall Street, analysts at Goldman Sachs predict that budget deficits will total about $5 trillion over the next 10 years.
"I've been watching this more than 30 years, and I have never seen anything quite this egregious," said Stanley Collender, a longtime author on budget issues and a senior vice president at Financial Dynamics, a communications firm in Washington.
"They are cutting the deficit from a number they never believed in the beginning," Mr. Collender said, referring to the decision to measure progress against the unrealized $521 billion deficit projection. "What if they had forecast that the deficit would be $800 billion last year? Would they take credit for having cut it by half?"
White House officials are making several budgeting decisions that make their tax revenues look higher and their spending look lower than many analysts think is realistic.
The first is to exclude a wide range of future costs for proposals, like those for military operations in Iraq, that White House officials say are impossible to predict.
Mr. Bush has consistently refused to include Iraq costs in his annual budget request, seeking money through a supplemental appropriations bill that lies outside the official budget. The White House asked for and received $87 billion for the last fiscal year, as well as another $25 billion to cover the first few months of the 2005 fiscal year. The administration is expecting to ask for as much as $80 billion more in the next few months, but it will not include any cost estimates in Mr. Bush's budget for the 2006 fiscal year.
As described above, the Bush Admin. is also being deceitful by using an overestimate of the budget deficit last year-a mistaken number everyone knows is a mistake-as their starting point for meeting Bush's promise.
The Bush Plan
Use a fake number as a starting point. Then fake costs by putting expensive items off-budget. Then boast about keeping a promise.
This article is part of a regular series of my blog at:
http://MoveLeft.com