Deficit Worries Threaten Bush Agenda(War/recession no longer justify)

[papau]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3261-2005Feb6.html


Deficit Worries Threaten Bush Agenda(War/recession no longer justify)
GOP Lawmakers, Others Say War and Recession No Longer Justify Mounting Debt
By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 7, 2005; Page A05


In 1992, Ross Perot likened the federal budget to a patient spurting blood in an emergency room. "Step one is to stop the bleeding, and we are bleeding arterially," the independent presidential candidate declared at one of that year's debates.

It has been a while since Americans routinely heard metaphors like that. But signs are blossoming that deficit politics is finally making a comeback -- with big implications for the expansive second-term agenda promoted by President Bush.

Concern by fellow Republicans about borrowing as much as $2 trillion in transition costs, for instance, is one of the big problems facing his plan to restructure Social Security to allow individual investment accounts.

And as Bush prepares to release his proposed fiscal 2006 budget today, some Republican lawmakers and fiscal experts are warning that the arguments he invoked in his first term for tolerating big deficits -- mainly the twin demands of war and recession -- are no longer sufficient to justify mounting debt. In last week's State of the Union address, the president himself promised a new austerity in domestic programs.

"Personally, I think we are setting ourselves up for problems" unless Republicans begin living up to their reputation as a tough-on-spending party, said Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), a former governor who since coming to Congress in 1993 has been known as one of the party's "deficit hawks."<snip>

[FloridaPat]

1. Amazing how cuts never include the invasions. The DOD has lost

a trillion dollars, so they get a raise. We invade another country and the oil sales will pay for everything, but it doesn't. Halliburton gets billions and can't account for it. $9 billion dissappears from Iraq and no one knows where it went. And the idiots get re-elected??

[rkc3]

2. What's $2,000,000,000,000 when you have a man-date and capital?