And this administration is supposed to be run by businessmen? How can any business run like this?!!! The only money I see them bringing in is for a campaign war chest. I guess all those rich people have to throw their huge tax cuts somewhere and Bush is the best used car salesman around.


July 16, 2003 NY TIMES
The Deficit Floats Up and Away

aving done its utmost to choke back the revenue flow into the Treasury, the Bush administration offered a running tab on this year's exploding budget deficit yesterday. To hear the casual patter of White House aides about the deficit, one would think it was pocket change. In fact, the shortfall has ballooned 50 percent in just five months, to $455 billion and counting. This historic high shows no sign of cresting, certainly not while the president's detaxation mania rolls forward. The White House firmly insists that the growing wad of government costs and debt being rolled across the years toward tomorrow's taxpayers is eminently "manageable." Actually, what was manageable was the $127 billion surplus the fledgling administration enjoyed just two years ago.

That surplus has disappeared into the Potomac mists, along with the Republicans' creaky posture as deficit hawks. A decade of deficit spending now awaits the nation, rooted in an anemic economy, pervasive joblessness, the rising costs of the American occupation of Iraq and Mr. Bush's tax cuts for the upper brackets. Independent estimates suggest that the deficit will grow to the half-trillion-dollar level next year and barrel on through the next decade at a cost in excess of $4 trillion once Congress's hypocritical commitment to "sunset" various tax cuts is quietly reversed.

The White House never fails to seize on optimistic predictions that the economy will tick back up zestfully next year in Mr. Bush's "jobs and growth" program, an agenda that has so far delivered far more tax cuts than recovery. A sobering estimate of the detax-and-spend policies of the president and the Republican-controlled Congress is offered by the Concord Coalition, the budget watchdog group, which warns of devastating long-range effects from "a schizophrenic pursuit of small-government tax policies and big-government spending initiatives." Politicians have broken vows not to tap Social Security funds, leaving costly entitlement promises to baby boomers looming at the shore of red ink that now pools forth into the nation. The White House hardly scans that shore, offering no details in its newly minted promise to cut the deficit in half "over the next few years."





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