February 08, 2006News & Politics
That's Bush's whole "I have a plan to cut the deficit in half by 2009" thing.
If you're not familiar with the Paygo rules enacted under Clinton, here's a bit of background from the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities:
This comes from the good folks at Rawstory:
President George W. Bush's fiscal year 2007 budget quietly omits a table included in previous years which lays out the impact of the Administration's proposed policies on the deficit…
The missing table was first discovered by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its omission -- a single table among thousands and thousands of pages that follow a standard format each year -- likely signals that the Administration is trying to keep the focus off the massive deficits which the United States will incur after 2010.
Bloomberg News notes that under the 2007 budget, the federal deficit would decline until 2010 and then start rising at a remarkable rate.
That's Bush's whole "I have a plan to cut the deficit in half by 2009" thing.
"If Congress makes Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, most of the impact won't be felt until after 2011, long after the president has left office," the financial news service writes. "Some of the tax reductions are due to expire at the end of 2008 and the rest in 2010."
The loss of revenue between 2012 and 2016 is projected at $1.2 trillion.
The deficit was resolved for the first time under President Bill Clinton, when the U.S. budget showed a surplus. Since President Bush took office, his tax cuts have reopened the deficit door. Last year's budget deficit was $413 billion.Actually, the deficits have gotten uglier since 2002, when this borrow-and-spend (and cut taxes on the wealthiest) Congress allowed the Paygo rules to expire. This latest bit of budgetary shenanigans, beyond highlighting the dishonesty that has become the hallmark of Bushenomics, shows how much commonsense we lost when Paygo got killed.
If you're not familiar with the Paygo rules enacted under Clinton, here's a bit of background from the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities:
The pay-as-you-go rule was originally designed during the last period of chronically high deficits to prevent policy changes that would make the situation worse… It [required] anyone proposing new tax cuts or entitlement expansions to come up either with a way of paying for them without enlarging the deficit or with 60 votes in the Senate to bypass the rule. Requiring this simple trade-off had a powerful effect. As the Congressional Budget Office has noted, “Between 1991 and 1997, most new revenue and mandatory spending laws that were enacted were consistent with the PAYGO requirement to be deficit neutral.� This deficit neutrality combined with spending restraint on discretionary programs and a strong economy to produce a budget surplus by 1998.Paygo lost popularity in the Congress because the Repubs didn't want to say what cuts they'd make to pay for their tax cuts. I know that this is the sort of too-wonky-by-far issue that politicians hate to run on, but I sure wish someone would do it anyway.
