Chief Judge Margaret Marshall(South Africa,Democrat,NewYorkTimes,SJC-Massachusetts)
Posted on 06/18/2006 3:02:06 AM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
The Republican base is angry about deficits, and suddenly administration officials and tax-axing lawmakers cannot stop talking about fiscal discipline. If they were sincere, they would reinstate the pay-as-you-go budget rules that were enforced from 1990 through 2000 and were instrumental in creating budget surpluses from 1998 to 2001. Lawmakers had to pay for new tax cuts and new entitlement spending by raising other taxes or cutting programs.
But the foxhole fiscal conservatives do not really mean what they are saying. An audacious administration talking point — advanced most prominently of late by the new White House budget chief, Rob Portman — is that the original pay-go rules are biased against tax cuts and in favor of spending.
The complaint is ridiculous, but easy for the administration to make given the complexity of the details. Suffice it to say that pay-go would treat nearly all of the tax and spending laws passed by Congress in exactly the same way. The only difference occurs in an arcane area involving new entitlements with expiration dates. And even there, the pay-go system does not give any edge to spending over tax cuts.
Unwilling to submit to the fiscal discipline of pay-go, House Republicans are instead hashing out a line-item veto that would give President Bush the ability to delete specific items from budget bills. In the Senate, Judd Gregg, chairman of the Budget Committee, has proposed a kitchen sink of moldy ideas from the bad old days of budget deficits in the 1980's and early 1990's — none of which have ever shown much promise as a means of thwarting big budget deficits.
It's all a pathetic attempt to look tough while avoiding the tried-and-true — and truly tough — deficit fix: reinstating the original pay-as-you-go rules.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
Exactly. And weren't those surpluses of the '90's due in part to a temporary surge in Social Security collections (factored of course, in the general budget)?
For each new spending program Congress should be required to repeal existing programs which cost at least more than then the new program.
How does one program cost "at least more" than another?
Although the Times is right that spending needs to be brought under control I just can't take seriously a call for fiscal discipline from the champion of every new social program that comes down the pike. It's like being lectured about my drinking by an alcoholic.
One of the conditions Clinton enjoyed was all the Roth IRA conversions...A huge windfall of capital gains taxes were collected on that deal. Of course he underfunded Defense too.
As a small government conservative I must point out that defecits are shrinking due to economic expansion which have followed the Bush tax cuts. The earlier defecit expansion was due to the economic contraction from 9/11 and later the over the top Katrina response. There are many things which should be cut from the spending side but there is one HUGE thing we can do from the revenue side:
PASS THE FAIRTAX!!!! www.fairtax.org
If a new program is estimated to cost a billion dollars, then an existing program or programs totaling more than one billion must be repealed.
Instead of "existing programs which cost at least more than then the new program," did you mean "at least one existing program which cost more than the new program must be eliminated"?
Another graduate of the matchbook-cover Jayson Blair School of Journalism.
There were, of course, no budget surpluses during the Clinton years. The national debt went up every single year.
Another graduate of the matchbook-cover Jayson Blair School of Journalism.
There were, of course, no budget surpluses during the Clinton years. The national debt went up every single year.
The New York Times is simply reporting the "unified deficit" that BOTH parties have long referred to when talking about the deficit. It is true that the Gross Federal Debt (the debt that is currently about $8.3 trillion) went up every year under Clinton. In fact, it has gone up in every year since 1970. The problem with the "unified deficit" is that it does not include the monies that the government is borrowing from Social Security and the other trust funds. However, if the claim that we ran a surplus from 1998 to 2001 is a lie, so is the claim that we are on target to cut the deficit in half. Following is that claim from the White House web site at http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/budget/2007/index.html:
[The Budget] projects the deficit will decline from its projected 2004 peak of 4.5 percent of GDP ($521 billion) down to 1.4 percent ($208 billion) in 2009, more than in half and well below the 40-year historical average deficit of 2.3 percent.
To evaluate this claim, following are the figures from the most recent budget:
RECEIPTS, OUTLAYS, AND SURPLUSES OR DEFICITS(-): 1990-2011
(billions of dollars)
Public
Total Total Unified Public Def w/o Gross OASDI Medicare
Year Receipts Outlays Deficit Deficit OASDI Deficit Surplus Surplus GDP
---- -------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
1990 1032.1 1253.1 -221.0 -220.8 -279.1 -338.5 58.2 15.5 5735.4
1991 1055.1 1324.3 -269.2 -277.4 -331.0 -391.9 53.5 15.4 5935.1
1992 1091.3 1381.6 -290.3 -310.7 -361.5 -403.6 50.7 13.6 6239.9
1993 1154.5 1409.5 -255.1 -248.7 -295.4 -349.3 46.8 10.2 6575.5
1994 1258.7 1461.9 -203.2 -184.7 -241.4 -292.3 56.8 1.1 6961.3
1995 1351.9 1515.9 -164.0 -171.3 -231.8 -277.3 60.4 -7.1 7325.8
1996 1453.2 1560.6 -107.4 -129.7 -196.1 -260.9 66.4 8.9 7694.1
1997 1579.4 1601.3 -21.9 -38.3 -119.6 -187.7 81.3 -1.1 8182.4
1998 1722.0 1652.7 69.3 51.2 -48.2 -109.0 99.4 6.6 8627.9
1999 1827.6 1702.0 125.6 88.7 -36.0 -127.3 124.7 26.3 9125.3
2000 2025.5 1789.2 236.2 222.6 70.7 -23.2 151.8 29.9 9709.8
2001 1991.4 1863.2 128.2 90.2 -72.8 -141.2 163.0 25.2 10057.9
2002 1853.4 2011.2 -157.8 -220.8 -379.9 -428.5 159.1 28.6 10377.4
2003 1782.5 2160.1 -377.6 -373.0 -528.7 -561.6 155.7 8.1 10805.5
2004 1880.3 2293.0 -412.7 -382.1 -533.0 -594.7 150.9 6.1 11546.0
2005 2153.9 2472.2 -318.3 -296.7 -470.2 -550.6 173.5 14.1 12290.4
2006* 2285.5 2708.7 -423.2 -426.7 -607.1 -706.2 180.4 -5.1 13030.2
2007* 2415.9 2770.1 -354.2 -372.6 -565.2 -684.0 192.6 -31.4 13760.9
2008* 2590.3 2813.6 -223.3 -241.9 -454.7 -569.9 212.8 -27.0 14520.6
2009* 2714.2 2921.8 -207.6 -226.0 -455.9 -571.6 229.8 -32.4 15295.8
2010* 2878.2 3060.9 -182.7 -201.4 -426.1 -545.7 224.7 -40.0 16101.9
2011* 3034.9 3239.8 -204.9 -225.1 -436.2 -554.0 211.2 -58.7 16955.0
*estimated
Source: Budget of the United States Government, FY 2007: Historical Tables 1.1 and 7.1
As can be seen, the actual unified deficit was $413 billion in 2004 (the $521 billion figure was just a prior projection of the deficit) and is projected to be about $208 billion in 2009. That is just about a halving of the deficit in dollar terms. However, the gross federal debt increased $595 billion in 2004 and is projected to increase by $572 billion in 2009. That is a drop of less than 4 percent and both numbers are well over half a trillion dollars! All this is just in time for the Boomer retirement.
The following graph gives a visual display of various measures of the deficit:
The gray line is the unified deficit that both parties refer to and the red line is the change in the gross federal debt that you are referring to. The actual numbers and sources for the above table and graph are at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/def07.html.
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