America swimming in red ink

[UpInArms]

http://www.tcpalm.com/tcp/trib_editorials/article/0,1651,TCP_1111_2224313,00.html

One constant about forecasts of the federal budget deficit: They keep getting worse.

Last month, the White House predicted the deficit for the 2004 budget year, which begins this Oct. 1, would be $475 billion. Now the Congressional Budget Office says it will be $480 billion.

Both predictions are low, and the deficit more likely will exceed a half-trillion dollars. The White House professes nonchalance about the red ink, but congressional Republicans are increasingly uneasy and Democrats think they have themselves a campaign issue. They may have.

Come Sept. 30, when fiscal 2003 will end with a deficit of around $450 billion, President Bush will have obliterated the previous record for a deficit, $290 billion set by his father in 1992. President Clinton, buoyed by a good economy and prodded by a Republican Congress considerably more disciplined than the current one, had four straight years of budget surpluses and left office with the budget $127 billion in the black.

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and then there's the NYTs weighing in on the same theme at

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/02/opinion/02TUE4.html?ex=1063080000&en=3dd5057930323a22&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

Deficit? What Deficit?

The White House serenely brushed off a detailed caution from the Congressional Budget Office last week that the growth in the deficit is more likely to roar than retreat across the next decade, fed by the three Bush tax cuts and other debt-fattening indulgences. If that warning was not enough, how about the concern reported at the International Monetary Fund that the administration has no credible plan to restore budget balance? Yes, the I.M.F., which must lecture the profligates of the globe, is worried that a structural deficit will push up interest rates and restrain growth as America ceaselessly borrows to steer red ink from imbalanced budgets onto future taxpayers.

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note: it was nice to see Florida paper mentioning the surplus under Clinton...

[celestia671]

1. Bush plays golf while the nation crumbles...

Gee, kind of like when Nero fiddled while Rome burned!:nuke: