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Wed 16 Jul, 2003 03:10 pm
http://www.able2know.com/forums/posting.php?mode=newtopic&f=21
Quote:July 15, 2003
White House Sees Record Deficit of $455B
By ALAN FRAM
ASSOCIATED PRESS
White House Sees Record Deficit of $455B
WASHINGTON (AP) -
The Bush administration dramatically raised its budget deficit projections on Tuesday to $455 billion for this year and $475 billion for next, record levels fed by the limp economy, tax cuts and the battle against terrorism.
The totals would easily surpass the $290 billion shortfall of 1992 that has been the red ink high water mark until now. They also mark a deterioration by more than 50 percent since February.
The shortfalls would drop to $213 billion in 2007, before edging back up to $226 billion the following year - underscoring that major budget challenges will loom just as the huge baby boom generation begins to retire and relies ever more on federal benefits like Social Security.
The dreary numbers set Republicans and Democrats at each other's political throats over an issue the public has largely ignored in recent years - even as massive projected surpluses have melted into deep deficits in the budget's starkest, most abrupt turnabout ever.
White House officials and GOP lawmakers said congressional spending must be controlled and economic growth policies like tax cuts should be continued. They said President Bush has had other, more pressing concerns.
"Restoring a balanced budget is an important priority for this administration," White House budget director Joshua Bolten told reporters. "But a balanced budget is not a higher priority than winning the global war on terror, protecting the American homeland, or restoring economic growth and job creation."
"Deficits do matter," said House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa. "Spending-driven deficits matter even more."
Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail linked the unprecedented red ink to what they call Bush's mismanagement of the economy. Former House majority leader Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., a presidential candidate, called the deficit numbers a result of Bush's "abysmal and poor" economic record.
They also said the numbers masked a budget problem far worse than advertised, noting that the White House excluded the costs of a U.S. role in Iraq beyond this year. In addition, the administration only projected five years into the future, missing the massive long-range costs of Bush's plan to make recent tax cuts permanent, and of the retirement of the 75-million strong baby boom generation later this decade.
"Total fiction," Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said of the new Bush numbers.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told a House committee that he still supports tax reductions to spark the languid economy. But he said the cuts should be paid for with spending reductions or tax increases to keep deficits from growing - a comment that could complicate future GOP drives for new tax cuts,
To justify its prediction of shrinking deficits beginning in 2005, the White House envisions robust economic growth resuming this summer, producing more jobs and corporate profits and more federal revenue.
It also assumed that Congress will heed Bush's call for tight limits on the growth of most federal programs, besides defense, domestic security and automatic benefits like Social Security. Citing pressing needs, lawmakers have been unwilling to do that during Bush's first two years in office.
Even if the projections come true, they would still mark a head-turning about face in the government's fiscal status.
In his first months in office in 2001, Bush projected federal surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion from 2002 through 2011. Now, actual deficits and Bush projections total $2.1 trillion in red ink for the first seven years of that period - a $7.7 trillion reversal.
Bolten said the rosy 2001 estimates did not factor in a recession, a stock market collapse, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a war on terrorism or corporate scandals. The report said the largest factor for the turnabout has been lower revenue and higher spending caused by the weak economy - accounting for 53 percent of the change in the projected 2003 deficit, and 44 percent of the change in the budget's bottom line from 2004 through 2008.
The next largest factors have been the cost of tax cuts and higher spending, largely for defense and domestic security.
Bolten also said the more important measure of deficits is how they compare to the size of the U.S. economy, since that shows how much of an economic drag the shortfalls are.
The projected deficits for 2003 and 2004 would each be about 4.2 percent as large as the economy - numbers Bolten said were "manageable." Even so, they begin to near the relative sizes of deficits in the 1980s and early 1990s that helped spur that era's politicians - including the first President Bush - into deficit-cutting compromises.
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That doesn't include the cost of the war in Iraq, currently estimated at about $4 billion each month[/i].
This morning the Senate voted on a measure that would require the Bush administration to include the cost of the war in its deficit reports. Senator Byron Dorgan said "the administration knows it's spending $4 billion a month in Iraq and it makes little sense to pretend the costs do not exist." But the Republican-controlled Senate defeated the measure, so Bush is spared having to report the true size of the deficit.
Just for kicks and giggles, give this article a perusal.
http://news4florida.tripod.com/indexfraud.html
It is about the whacky bookkeeping during Bush Sr.'s days at the White House. I'd be interested in knowing exactly how much truth there is in this article.
Some excerpts from it:
Quote:
These documents I received were essentially transcripts of personal notes made by a Democratic congressman who was very friendly with Bill Clinton and had conversations with him during the first several months of his first term in 1993. This congressman had attended a luncheon for congressional Democrats with the President and the President had mentioned that he, Bill Clinton, was aware that the economic numbers that the Reagan-Bush Regime had put out were all wrong, particularly when it came to the size of the annual budget deficits and the accumulated national debt.
When Bush left the White House, the last debt numbers published by the Bush Regime was $5.66 trillion, when, in fact, the actual size of the debt was about $14 trillion. In other words, the national debt was about three times the stated numbers.
The Bush Administration had publicly stated that the federal budget deficit for fiscal 1992 was $360 billion. As it turned out, the fiscal budget deficit for 1992 going into calendar year 1993 was over $700 billion.
By the end of 1992, the Bush Regime had raped and pillaged any source of money that was available to rape and pillage, meaning they had denuded every penny out of the 43 public trust funds, which are constitutionally sacrosanct. It is considered a High Crime for an administration to take money out of the sacrosanct public trust funds. The money does not belong to the United States Government. It belongs to the people of the United States.
They had taken $5 trillion out of the 43 national public trust funds and they had denuded the federal treasury of all of its reserve funds, and they had illegally taken from the Federal Reserve its emergency currency stabilization fund. They had drawn out all collateralized letters of credit. They had issued as much debt equity as they could under the federal agencies - Ginny Mae, Freddy Mae, etc. They had sold as many notes as they could and they had issued as many restricted and worthless notes as they dared.
Greenspan pointed out in 1992 that the nation could not have survived another 4 years of Bushonomics because what they had been doing could simply not be hidden for another 4 years. The economic effects of what they had done would begin to filter through the economy and at that point, the jig would be up. When the truth is going to cause economic pain in government and capital marketplaces, you can't come out with it all at once. It has to be dribbled out a little at a time. The negative impact on the economy then has to be absorbed gradually because if you come out with it all at once, you'll have a debacle on your hands, which nobody wants.
The Bush [Jr.]Administration has already admitted that after the coming election they will begin the repillaging of social security - by taking FICA taxes and counting them as general revenues. You're then borrowing from the future every year that you do that. These are the same old "Smoke and Mirror" accounting practices, which were used during the Bush Cabal's first 12 years. They are being used once again to disguise the actual size of Bushonian generated economic deficits. It's entirely possible that we will have a double dip recession because stocks can not continue to increase while the larger economic fundamentals which propel the nation's economy continue to worsen.
The question remains - with its control of mainstream media, can the Bush Cabal continue to hide from the American people the extent of its malfeasance?
When does it all come tumbling down? When everybody knows the truth.
This gets into the Bushonian notion that anybody who tells the truth is being "unpatriotic" or dangerous to the security of the nation. We are no longer talking about the economic health of the nation vis-à-vis Bushonomics. To those who would say that what we are doing is creating further anxiety by telling people the truth, it should be noted that we are talking about economic survival.
I'm waiting for the part about this all being Bill Clinton's fault.
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