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Tony Blair isn’t
the only head of state getting bad reviews by members of the people’s body. A little anger from Capital Hill,
courtesy Sen. Hollings, a fiscal conservative. Is the Bush2
economic agenda just another matter of not having to fly under the radar screen
anymore, as Grover Norquist has bragged and encouraged, this week publicly? KWC Delusional on the Deficit
By Ernest F. Hollings, Editorial
in the WP, Thursday, June 19, 2003; Page A27 Nobody is paying any attention to the
budget deficit. Last month the
House Budget Committee's Democrats forecast a deficit of nearly $500 billion,
and The Post reported the story on Page A4. Last week the Congressional Budget Office reported that the
deficit would balloon to a record $400 billion-plus, and The Post again buried
the story on A4. Spending trust
funds, such as Social Security, is what keeps the estimate at $400
billion. The actual deficit will
be approximately $600 billion. That's a win for Mitch
Daniels. The goal of the departed
Office of Management and Budget director was to keep any news that could hurt
President Bush's reelection prospects off the front page, and The Post
willingly aided and abetted him.
In fact, when Daniels left two weeks ago to run for governor of Indiana,
he told The Post that the government is "fiscally in fine
shape." Good grief! During his 29-month tenure, he turned a
so-called $5.6 trillion, 10-year budget surplus into a $4 trillion deficit -- a
mere $10 trillion downswing in just two years. If this is good fiscal policy, thank heavens Daniels is
gone. Congress is no better
than the press. Republicans, totally in control of this
town, just casually raised the limit on the national debt by a record trillion
dollars so the president could borrow more money to pay for tax cuts. I say casually because the seriousness of
this move was passed over and hardly debated. In The Post, this story wasn't even worthy of A4. It was relegated to A8. Bush and Daniels used
to talk about how they would repay the nation's debt more quickly than any
administration in history. Before
Sept. 11, 2001, the president bragged that his budget reserved $1 trillion for
unforeseen circumstances. Perish
the thought that the war on terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq cost $1
trillion. Those factors had an impact, but the real
culprit, according to the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, is that this president
has cut $3.12 trillion in revenue since taking office. These are the largest tax cuts in
history, yet the administration claims they have no relationship to the record
deficits reported on Page A4. Amazingly,
he asks for more. The London-based Financial Times, in a front-page lead story, recently
reported the Treasury Department projection that at the present rate, fixing
the deficit would require "the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66
percent across-the-board income tax increase." The
White House deep-sixed the Treasury study. The Post ignored it. Former commerce
secretary Peter Peterson, a lifelong Republican, says that every time this
administration faces a choice, it chooses tax cuts. Between fiscal
responsibility and tax cuts, it picks tax cuts. Between preserving Social
Security and tax cuts, it picks tax cuts. Between providing necessary funds to fight the war on
terrorism and tax cuts, it picks tax cuts. "Again and again,"
Peterson says, "they choose tax cuts." The question: How huge
must the deficit grow for this A4 story to make the front page, and for the
public to scream for relief? Across
the country teachers are being laid off, there are more kids per classroom, the
school year is shorter, and tuition is up at state colleges. Bus service is being cut off, volunteers
are running park systems, prisoners are being released, and subsidies for the
working poor are being slashed. How much more must we dismantle before the
public cannot stomach this? Will it take a shutdown of all the
national parks? Or the release of
all federal prisoners because we can't afford to guard them? Or will workers need to pay half their
salaries to keep Social Security and Medicare from the chopping block? I dread to think how
bad it has to get before Bush makes some changes. But the Republican leadership in Congress is in lockstep. They've just passed a budget calling for
a $600 billion deficit
each year, every year, for the next 10 years. The writer, a
Democratic senator from South Carolina, has served on the Senate Budget
Committee since its inception in 1974 and was its chairman in 1980-81. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11221-2003Jun18.html?nav=hptoc_eo |
