White House Touts Falling Budget Deficit

[leftchick]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050713/ap_on_go_pr_wh/budget_deficit

~snip~

"These numbers indicate that we're going to cut the deficit in half faster than the year 2009 — so long as Congress holds the line on spending," Bush said following a Cabinet meeting.

Just last February, the White House predicted a $427 billion deficit for the budget year ending Sept. 30 and red ink totaling $1.1 trillion over five years. The five-year deficit improvement would total $326 billion.

Last year's deficit of $412 billion was a record in dollar terms, though many previous deficits in the mid-1980s and early 1990s were larger when measured against the size of the economy.


~snip~

Despite the improvement, the deficit picture remains far worse than when Bush took office in 2001, when both White House and congressional forecasters projected cumulative surpluses of $5.6 trillion over the subsequent decade. Then, it forecast a surplus for this year of $269 billion.

[trotsky]

1. "so long as Congress holds the line on spending"?!?!?!

You're the asshole who submits the budget, dipshit! You've gotten every mammoth deficit you've wanted.

MAN the lack of objective reporting on this just pisses me off.

[Garbo 2004]

5. They'll be pushing for another tax cut next. Since it's all good news.

And Iraq is just peachy too. Still waiting for Iraq to pay for itself, oh but that's right, the genius Wolfowitz who said it would is at...the World Bank. All is wonderful in BushWorld.

:puke:

[ananda]

2. Yeah, keep making war on..

.. the poor and middle classes and the deficit will go down, although making war on innocents in the ME keeps making it go up!

Sheesh.

Sue

[tk2kewl]

3. restated:

we've done such a good job screwing you all in five years we wont need to run the debt so high over the next five, now where's the nearest bathtub.

[DakotaDemocrat]

4. Do you think MBNA or Citibank would enjoy...

...me calling them today and say, "Great news, I'm going to pay off half of my debt to you in another four years!"

Problem is, China is this country's credit card company getting the prinicpal plus interest. It seems to me, we're funding their growth...

[atreides1]

6. But

Isn't it true that this administration isn't counting all of the supplemental spending for the war?

If you add the supplemental into the mix, the deficit stays the same,
doesn't it?

[leftchick]

7. exactly

I can only imagine the sort of Arthur Anderson accounting going on in this administration.

[underpants]

8. Already debunked by Krugman "Un-Spin the Budget"

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/opinion/11krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fPaul%20Krugman

[Media_Lies_Daily]

9. Excellent! Thanks!

[leftchick]

10. "Deep in the Fiscal Quagmire" Indeed...

Thank you for the link. No one explains the bogus numbers better than Paul....

~snip~

A close look at the tax data explains why these experts believe that we're seeing a temporary uptick in revenues, not a sustained change in the trend. Taxes that are closely tied to the number of jobs and the average wage, such as payroll taxes and income taxes automatically withheld from paychecks, aren't showing any big pickup. This confirms other data showing that the economy as a whole is, if anything, doing worse than one would expect at this stage of an economic recovery.

It turns out that all of the upside surprise in tax receipts is coming from two sources. One is tax payments from corporations, up both because last year corporate profits grew much more rapidly than the rest of the economy and because the effective tax rate on corporations went up when a temporary tax break, introduced in 2002, expired. Both are one-time events

The other source of increased revenue is nonwithheld income taxes - taxes that aren't deducted from paychecks but are instead paid by people receiving additional, nonsalary income. The bounce in nonwithheld taxes probably reflects mainly capital gains on stocks and real estate, together with bonuses paid in the finance and real estate industries. Again, this revenue boost looks like a temporary blip driven by rising stocks and the housing bubble.

In other words, we're still deep in the fiscal quagmire, with federal revenues far below what's needed to pay for federal programs. And we won't get out of that quagmire until a future president admits that the Bush tax cuts were a mistake, and must be reversed.