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HarryKrause wrote:
wrote:

I think your source may be slightly biased, Harry.

According to the non-partisan National Debt Clock, Bush is only
allowing congress to spend us into the red at an average of 2.25
billion dollars a day, not 3-something, when the average is stretched
back to September 30, 2004.

However, I don't know if that $2.25 billion includes the actual cost of
the invading Iraq- which as we all know is not considered part of the
budget. (Perhaps that means it's not real money)

The following Newsday item (outlining Alan Greenspan's alarm at the
fiscal train wreck we are about to experience) makes a curious point:
Why is George Bush declaring a crisis in Social Security based on the
fact that disbursements will begin exceeding receipts in 2042, when the
entire government is borrowing increasing amounts of money, every day,
in 2005 just to try to pay the bills? Old Billy C. may have screwed an
intern or two, but at least we ran some (apparent) supluses in his day.

Deficits just can't continue
Greenspan wants pay-as-you-go

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March 4, 2005

So now you've heard it from Alan Greenspan, the nation's pre-eminent
economic soothsayer: Federal budget deficits are unsustainable and over
time will "cast an ever-larger shadow over the growth of living
standards."

In less measured language, that means unless President George W. Bush
and the Congress stop cutting taxes and spending money like drunken
sailors, they will so undermine the economy that Americans should no
longer expect to live better tomorrow than they do today.

In his statement Wednesday before the House Budget Committee, the
federal reserve chairman made no direct mention of Bush's pledge to cut
the deficit in half by 2009. But it doesn't take much reading between
the lines to surmise that he appears to put little stock in the
president's promise. The reality is, Bush is not on a course to halve
the deficit.

Washington can't afford to make the president's multi-trillion-dollar
tax cuts permanent, as Bush wants. And it can't afford to continue
accepting the budget gimmicks Bush is so fond of - keeping the cost of
the war in Iraq off the books, for instance - while racking up record
deficits.

Congress should heed Greenspan's pitch for a return to the
pay-as-you-go budget rules that expired in 2002. That's the very year
that the budget plunged back into deficit after four years in the black
- and Washington has been wallowing in red ink ever since.

The concept is as simple as it is key. Under the rules, if Congress
increased spending or cut taxes, then the cost to the treasury would
have to be offset by other spending cuts or tax increases. Bush says he
wants to return to that tough fiscal discipline but he insists it
should not apply to tax cuts. That's fiscal discipline in name only and
a sure formula for more deficits.

In trying to sell the nation on the notion that Social Security is in
crisis, Bush has said repeatedly that the program will be bankrupt in
2042 because starting then, it will be obligated to pay out more money
than it takes in. There is more than a bit of sophistry in that
assertion. But if you accept the president's logic on Social Security,
then the federal government, which spent $412 billion more last year
than it collected in taxes, is bankrupt now and has been practically
from the day Bush took control of the purse strings. You can argue
about the rhetoric but there's no denying Washington needs to get
serious about balancing the books.

My take on Bush and the social security scam he is promoting is that it
is just another political payoff for his campaign supporters on Wall
Street. They'll reap enormous financial benefits out of any diversion in
the social security accounts.

There is nothing preventing Congress from setting up a totally separate
mechanism under the aegis of social security that allows Americans to
earmark additional pretax dollars for some sort of supplemental
retirement savings account that might be invested prudently in any
manner of ways. Who the hell would object to that? No one.

Let us not forget, that by his own admission, The Bush plan for private
accounts will do *NOTHING* to correct the projected shortfall in the
present system.

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