Is half the business media nuts? - lower Defict est cause by supply side

[papau]

theory working?

From our friends at the LA Times - Vieth and Simon - we get this little thought that the Administration's revised budget forecast provides "ammunition to supply-side advocates who contended that tax cuts helped pay for themselves." - and not a word about how silly that thought is! :-(
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-deficit14jul14,1,4457939.story?coll=la-news-a_section

Meanwhile the Washington Post's John Weisman appears to get it correct: "Independent budget experts cautioned that a number of debatable assumptions underpin the White House's deficit projections. The improved budget picture for 2005 is almost all the result of $87 billion in unanticipated tax receipts, much of which may have resulted from one-time events, such as a one-year corporate tax holiday enacted last year."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071301617.html

I am looking for about 1.5 Trillion to come back and be taxed (about twice what the WSJ estimates) - so 750 time 5% = $40 Billion in reduction in the 10/1 to 12/31 2004 time frame - and $40 billion in the to 10/1 2005 time frame (and the total reduction is only $87 billion).

Add in a bit of higher capital gains just because the local market has done "OK" in the past year, and add in the overestimate we all noted when the estimate was originally done, and add in the expense we know that will be pushed into the next fiscal year so as to justify this years tax cut - and offset the expense pushed into this year last year as Bush faked the numbers, , add in the very modest payroll tax growth that appears not to have been anticipated which Bush uses as an offset, and finally add in the higher than expected corporate profits from just "growth" with no wage increase, and I think you have a good handle on the reasons for the "great - only a little bit over $300 billion" estimate for the years deficit.

I wish I could run a business on making investors happy that my projected years loss of 50% of operating capital will now only be a 25% loss of operating capital.

So is only half our media - the folks doing the fiscal/company/business side - NUTS?

[sam sarrha]

1. with unemployment up and wages down and prices up..gas WAY UP!!

i dont think so...

[snippy]

2. This year's deficit will be the third largest deficit in US history.

The original White House estimate of $427 billion would have been the largest in history. The only two years in which the deficit exceeded the new, downwardly revised, estimate of $333 billion were 2003 and 2004.

A deficit of "only" $333 billion will mark the first time in three years that the deficit has not exceeded 3% of GDP. Since 1960, the deficit has exceeded that level 14 times. Each and every time was under a republican president.

Since 1960, the total accumulated deficits of the federal government equals approximately $4 trillion. Over 90% of that total has been accumulated under republican presidents. The last republican president not to run massive deficits was Eisenhower. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006/sheets/hist01z3.xls