July 18, 2005
worked then, works now...
Michael Barone is always worth reading. His latest is: Bush well on way to meeting deficit promise.
So the deficit—the federal budget deficit—is declining sharply, more sharply than just about anyone in mainstream media anticipated. According to figures from the Office of Management and Budget, the deficit is projected to decline from $412 billion in 2004 to $333 billion in 2005, a 19 percent decline. OMB further projects, obviously with less certitude, that it will decline to $162 billion in 2008.
If so, that will mean that George W. Bush will have more than kept his promise to cut the deficit in half in his second term. Back in February, OMB projected a 2005 deficit of $427 billion...
Well, we told you so. But intentional blindness on this subject is still alive and healthy. I remember back in the 1980's conservatives pushing the Laffer Curve, and liberals plugging their ears and saying "La la la I can't hear you." As Orrin said somewhere, "We laffered all the way to the bank."
Of course it worked then. (Remember how the Reagan deficits were going to crush America, and leave our children in poverty?)
And it worked for JFK. (Funny thing, how when Dems are in the WH, prosperity gets happy names. The "Go-go Years?" Remember? If it's a Republican, then you have "Decade of Greed." The prosperity Reagan brought us actually continued into the 90's, but a Dem got into the WH, so instantly "greed" disappeared.
I shudder to think what the coming prosperity will be named, once the libs reluctantly acknowledge that it exists...
Posted by John Weidner at July 18, 2005 09:01 AM | TrackBackWhich deficit promise is this you're talking about?
The one he made when first elected, that we could have a massive tax cut, a new Medicare benefit, and still have the nation's deficit shrinking?
Or the one a year or so later, when he said the red ink was purely temporary, gone in a year or so?
Or the one a year after that, when he said he'd get the 10yr deficit growth down to only a few hundred billion a year (after all, the war in Iraq would only cost, tops, one billion dollars!)?
You know, its really easy to hit your target when you just keep moving it closer and closer...
You do realize, he's been off (and still is) by several HUNDRED billion dollars, not least of which is due to the fact that the numbers you cite EXCLUDE the cost of the war in Iraq (roughly $80-100 billion annually), and INCLUDES the SS surplus of roughly $160 billion. So if we actually "lockbox" SS, and count the cost of the war (don't you love how conservatives can do thinks so much less expensively than tax-and-spend libs...by just declaring the billions they spend as "off-budget", and poof! they don't exist), then your 2005 deficit changes to $573 billion, and (assuming he hasn't cut-and-run from Iraq by then) in 2008 about $450 billion...
Oh, and who is it going "la-la-la-I can't hear you"?? Reagan gave us (then) the largest tax cut in US history in 1981...and the fastest climb in the nation's deficit...and then followed it with SEVEN consecutive tax increases!!! But who is it who pretends that one tax cut was responsible for decades of growth that followed?? And always ignores the rest of his years?
Posted by: Zoomie at July 20, 2005 08:39 PM
