aving done its utmost to choke back the revenue flow
into the Treasury, the Bush administration offered a running tab on this
year's exploding budget deficit yesterday. To hear the casual patter of
White House aides about the deficit, one would think it was pocket change.
In fact, the shortfall has ballooned 50 percent in just five months, to
$455 billion and counting. This historic high shows no sign of cresting,
certainly not while the president's detaxation mania rolls forward. The
White House firmly insists that the growing wad of government costs and
debt being rolled across the years toward tomorrow's taxpayers is
eminently "manageable." Actually, what was manageable was the $127 billion
surplus the fledgling administration enjoyed just two years ago.
That surplus has disappeared into the Potomac mists, along with the
Republicans' creaky posture as deficit hawks. A decade of deficit spending
now awaits the nation, rooted in an anemic economy, pervasive joblessness,
the rising costs of the American occupation of Iraq and Mr. Bush's tax
cuts for the upper brackets. Independent estimates suggest that the
deficit will grow to the half-trillion-dollar level next year and barrel
on through the next decade at a cost in excess of $4 trillion once
Congress's hypocritical commitment to "sunset" various tax cuts is quietly
reversed.
The White House never fails to seize on optimistic predictions that the
economy will tick back up zestfully next year in Mr. Bush's "jobs and
growth" program, an agenda that has so far delivered far more tax cuts
than recovery. A sobering estimate of the detax-and-spend policies of the
president and the Republican-controlled Congress is offered by the Concord
Coalition, the budget watchdog group, which warns of devastating
long-range effects from "a schizophrenic pursuit of small-government tax
policies and big-government spending initiatives." Politicians have broken
vows not to tap Social Security funds, leaving costly entitlement promises
to baby boomers looming at the shore of red ink that now pools forth into
the nation. The White House hardly scans that shore, offering no details
in its newly minted promise to cut the deficit in half "over the next few
years."
