Wednesday, January 26, 2005

About the huge budget deficit

$427 billion is predicted for the current fiscal year.

Democrats will blame Bush and the Iraq war exclusively. At $105 billion for the current year, the Iraq war is certainly contributing the the deficit, but take away the $105 billion and it's still a pretty huge $322 billion.

I blame the culture of big government and big spending. Bush's domestic policy is about new and unnecessary programs and not eliminating existing programs.

Clinton was lucky that he was president during the time of the stock market bubble, when capital gains and corporate incomes were at an unsustainable cyclical peak. Bush doesn't have such luck, so he must reduce the budget deficit through spending reduction.

8 comments:

guy in the UNLV jacket said...

LG, Did you come up with that on your own or did your parents help? What do you suggest they cut?

mikeca said...

Clinton was not just lucky. He also raised taxes, reduced the size of the government, and reformed welfare to reduce government spending. The reduced government deficit allowed interest rates to go down, which in turn helped the economy and increased tax revenue.

Bush has ruled out tax increases, but so far he has not shown much interest in cutting spending. In fact he has made a number of proposals that increase spending, like the Medicare drug benefit. The huge farm bill is another government pork barrel spending bill that Bush should have vetoed if he was serious about cutting spending. Perhaps now that the elections are over, Bush will get serious about cutting spending.

Chad said...

Clinton didn't institute welfare reform, he vetoed it a number of times before finally being forced to sign it.

Scott said...

Whereas Bush, to my knowledge, has yet to veto a single thing.

Author said...

We should coin a new word for Bush worshipping "libertarians". Bushitarian? Bulshitarian? Liberpublican? Libercon?

Unknown said...

Ha! Christ, you're just bending over backwards to excuse the ol' Bushmeister aren't you?

Tom Hanna said...

Sure. I'll take Bulshitarian, but can we add an extra l just to be clear.

Now what do we get to call "libertarians" who insist on a narrow libertarian orthodoxy?

Anonymous said...

Yes, he must reduce spending, but if history is an indicator (876 bills sent to Bush, 876 signed), he won't.