Senate Approves Tougher Deficit Curbs

BO was being disingenuous when he implied that he couldn't freeze spending until next year. He could have had an executive order in his hand to freeze ALL government spending, effective immediately. Instead he chose to wow the idiots by promising to freeze one half of one percent of the federal budget. Don't get me wrong, fifteen billion is a lot of money to you and me, but it's nothing in comparison to the three trillion dollar budget. It's like being $100 over on your household budget this month and thinking that cutting back on a fifty cent candy bar will fix the problem. It's a joke.

I see the echo chamber is still going strong.

Since 2001, even with record low inflation, U.S. federal spending has increased by a massive 28.8% (19.7% in real dollars)—with non-defense discretionary growth of 35.7% (25.3% in real dollars)—the highest rate of federal government growth since the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. This increase has resulted in the largest budget deficits in U.S. history, an estimated $520 billion in fiscal year 2004 alone. Furthermore, the projected spending for 2005 is a conservative estimate, since it doesn’t include at least $50 billion for the 2005 cost of the Iraq occupation.

As predicted by Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs, author of such key books as Crisis and Leviathan and the new Against Leviathan, this explosion of government power would only have been possible in the aftermath of 9/11. Times of crisis present the easiest opportunities for politicians to take advantage of a frightened American public.

President George W. Bush is now on his way to becoming the first full-term president since John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) to not veto a single bill. The result is a congress that has been completely unconstrained in satiating its appetite for pork and corporate welfare. In response, Democratic challenger John Kerry has maligned alleged spending cuts and called for even higher taxes and spending. The consequence is that we now have two parties competing to see which can grow government faster.

From the massive increases in agricultural subsidies in the farm bill of 2002, to the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement of 2003; from the 47% increase in the defense budget, to the 80% increase in education spending, George W. Bush has demonstrated that “limited government” is not part of his political vocabulary.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/news_detail.asp?newsID=31

maybe what he should be doing is "undoing 43"

bobby, your article was written in 2004. I'm not going to defend Bush 43. His fiscal policies were terrible, in fact just as bad as his father's. However, BO has run up more deficit in the first year of his presidency than Bush did in 8 years. It was 400 billion in Bush's worst year. It is 1.4 trillion for FY 2010 and is now projected at 1.6 trillion in FY 2011. Try to find a graph for that. The one you have isn't nearly tall enough to put it on, though.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29346452/



The revised deficit numbers reported by the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget today show a lower deficit than previously estimated for 2009, with higher deficits for 2010 and beyond. Political opportunists will be busy looking for chances to score points over these numbers—pinning the dismal fiscal picture on the Obama administration.

The real story is, however, fairly obvious. The policies of the Bush administration, which included tax cuts during a time of war and a floundering economy, are clearly the primary source of the current deficits. The Obama administration policies that are beginning to give the economy a needed jumpstart—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in particular—place a distant third in contributing to the 2009 and 2010 deficit numbers. The deficit picture for the years beyond still needs to be painted.

To come to these conclusions, we calculated the relative importance of the several factors contributing to the 2009 and 2010 deficits by looking at the impact in those years of various policies. A detailed description of our approach is at the end of this column. Below is the percentage share of the major contributing factors to the total deterioration from the surpluses projected in 2000 to the current deficits according to our analysis. The policies of President George W. Bush make up the largest share, followed by the current economic downturn, and then President Barack Obama’s policies.

The Budget Deficit: How Did We Get Here?

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/obama-budget-history-federal-budget-deficit/story?id=9721492

Lest we forget where the huge deficits and debt came from...

On August 25, 2001, just seven months after taking office, George W. Bush learned that his budgets had already erased the previous administration's huge surplus -- that was paying off our country's debt at a rapid rate -- and had instead forced the country to start borrowing again. Bush said it was "Incredibly Positive News''

President Bush said today that there was a benefit to the government's fast-dwindling surplus, declaring that it will create "a fiscal straitjacket for Congress." He said that was "incredibly positive news" because it would halt the growth of the federal government.

Bush certainly wasn't the first conservative to think deficits and debt were a good thing. Conservatives had for years advocated a strategy to "starve the beast" by intentionally plunging the country into debt, forcing cutbacks in government oversight of corporate behavior such as regulatory oversight, safety inspections and consumer protections.

In the 1980 campaign for President, Reagan explained his tax cut strategy, after candidate John Anderson called for spending cuts,

"John tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes," Ronald Reagan declared in reply to the independent candidate, John Anderson. "Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."

In his two terms Reagan quadrupled the federal debt.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010020504/roots-conservative-failure-bush-called-deficits-incredibly-positive-news



because you "forgot"