Reagan Legacy - Budget lies- so "improving" deficit is due to high est.

[papau]

finally someone noticed the Bush election year con job of a 2/04 projection of a deficit of $521 billion, knowing that 521 is 100 higher than needed, so that as election approaches, Bush can release a lower forecast and proclaim that the deficit is being brought under control.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/politics/10budget.html

June 10, 2004
THE FISCAL LEGACY
Favoring Tax Cuts and Tolerating Deficits
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

ASHINGTON, June 9 - In domestic policy, President Ronald Reagan's most lasting legacy is the philosophy dominant in the White House today that tax cuts are the proper tonic for whatever ails the economy and that large budget deficits are not necessarily harmful.... In 1981, Congress approved a 25 percent reduction in income taxes and an increase of at least one-third in the military budget.<snip>

The federal deficit grew to $208 billion in the 1983 fiscal year, Mr. Reagan's second budget year, from $79 billion in the 1981 fiscal year, the last year the government operated under a budget prepared by President Jimmy Carter. As a percentage of the national economy, the deficit in 1983 was 6 percent, the highest ever, up from 2.6 percent in 1981.

The large deficits were antithetical to Mr. Reagan's view of himself as a fiscal conservative, and he never seemed completely reconciled to them. He signed tax increases later in his first term that repealed more than one-third of the 1981 tax cuts. But the lesson the Republicans in power today took from the Reagan experience was that they could disregard deficits. President Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill, reported in his book, "The Price of Loyalty," that at a crucial budget meeting, Vice President Dick Cheney brushed off a question about the deficit by saying, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."<snip>

Another lesson the current administration took from the Reagan years is that it can be politically advantageous to publish budgets with numbers that are less than fully honest.

Under Mr. Reagan, said Robert D. Reischauer, the economist who was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1987 to 1995, the Office of Management and Budget "ceased to be viewed as an objective estimator of budget numbers." That is also the case today, Mr. Reischauer said.

The budgets prepared by David A. Stockman, Mr. Reagan's first budget director, adopted what was called a "rosy scenario" - impossibly optimistic predictions about future growth, inflation and interest rates. They also included what was called the "magic asterisk" - a gimmick that allowed for the budgeting of unspecified, and never intended, spending cuts.<snip>