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February 07, 2005
Fog of the Budget
From Business Week, The Fog Of The Budget:
This budget -- which will cover fiscal years 2006 through 2010 -- will largely ignore the costs of Bush's own top priorities, including Iraq, restructuring Social Security, and taming the Alternative Minimum Tax. Nor will it reflect the long-term costs of making his 2001 and 2002 tax cuts permanent, which will largely occur starting in 2011. At the same time, it will spotlight initiatives that are unlikely to save much money, such as effectively freezing spending on most domestic programs or slowing the growth in federal funding for Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for the poor.
Such legerdemain will allow Bush to claim that he will meet his goal of slicing the deficit in half by fiscal 2009, the last budget he'll propose. But in reality, it will obscure an agenda that is likely to generate ever-larger deficits over the coming decades. ``It will show how tough the President can be on [some] spending,'' says Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates balanced budgets. ``But to leave out Social Security, the AMT, and the war costs and say you have a plan to cut the deficit in half over five years is beyond chutzpah.''
Posted by sam at 08:00 PM
Thanks Breean
More in our animal series...
Posted by sam at 06:29 PM