Buried in the latest federal budget submitted to Congress by the White House is a deficit reduction plan that projects elimination of the federal deficit by 2012.
But that ambitious plan is contigent on cutting off spending on the war in Iraq after 2009:
So all the Terrists[sup]®[/sup] have to do is wait 3 years and victory is theirs! Why does George Bush hate the troops?
Cripes! You Democrats ought to have your heads examined.
The fact is that the budget deficit has been pretty manageable for quite a while now. The real fiscal crisis is in entitlement spending. Everybody knows this - the administration worries about it, the Fed has explicitly warned about it, and it has been talked about for years.
Yet when anybody proposes anything about this problem, Democrats deny there is a crisis and use “Republican” worries about this problem to scare voters instead of fixing the problem as well.
Not very responsible, not at all.
As for defense spending, we’ll just see how it plays out, but even now defense spending is a mere tiny bit of GDP. I fail to see how it will make much difference down the road compared to the behemoth that is Social Security and Medicare.
So when a Democrat proposes a deadline for Iraq and threatens to cut off funding, he is emboldening the enemy. But when the President sets a deadline to cut off funding, he is doing the responsible thing. Got it.
To be fair, about all he is suggesting is that by that point in time, the whole clusteraq will be resolved. To be even more fair, he is not even figuring in the benefits to be reaped from $20 a barrell Iraqi oil, cause they just lurve us half to death…
Doesn’t look like a deadline to me, more like a projection. Which is a different kettle of fish entirely.
And you think we should have our heads examined?!?!?!?
Sure. A proposed budget is a different thing entirely from a resolution to cut off funding or deauthorize a conflict, isn’t it? If the Democrats do the latter, it is an affirmative step based on what they believe.
If, however, Bush finds in 2009 that troops still need to be there, he can shift other DoD money around or ask for more at that time.
You equating the two because you think they say the same thing indicates to me you don’t understand that these pieces of legislation would in fact work very differently.
And you failing to recognize they would have exactly the same effect tells you don’t care about Republican hypocrisy.
By early 2009 the asshole won’t have dick to do with the budget. Hopefully he’ll be facing a criminal court in La Hague – or at the very least cutting brush in his bunker.
It’s simply an unrealistic proposal to cut the huge deficit he’s sunk your country into…and try to look fiscally responsible at the same time.
Then again, your troops may have to be out of Iraq sooner than that. Not like they haven’t been defeated already, no point in hanging around just in order to shed some more young American blood in pursuit of the non-existent neocon Golden Chalice.
Brain fart. I of course meant the next Republican administration. 
Why do you hate America so much? Seriously.
Sorry, you don’t get to make this claim any more. Not after 2004. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, and during the election had promised to deal with looming Social Security insolvency. The only proposal that came out of that was private accounts, which not only would do nothing to fix the upcoming income-benefit gap but would in fact make it significantly worse by reducing income without decreasing benefits. The Republicans simply didn’t have the stones to make the unpopular choices that solving this situation is going to require: either raising taxes or cutting benefits. Hell, the deficit itself is just another example of trying to popular instead of responsible – hand down tax cuts now and let some other politician down the road find a way to pay for them.
Now, I have little faith that the Democrats will do much better when it comes to fixing Social Security, but either way the Republicans have forever lost their seat on that particular high horse.
Please cite prominent Dems’ claims that there is no looming crisis in entitlement spending.
Many Dems have concluded that the likelihood of a problem in Social Security spending isn’t all that great, and the worst case is that benefits after 2046 or whenever have to be cut by 25%.
And the GOP, of course, has a good deal of responsibility for the looming Medicare crisis, having approved Medicare Part D without dedicating any new funding sources to it. In fact, they did just the opposite and enacted a major tax cut that year.
Damn, I want this as a signature line. And possibly as a bumper sticker…! 
Typical of this is Ed Perlmutter, just elected to Congress from Colorado. He was given the mike for the Democrats weekly radio address in the fall, and gave the stock Democratic address on Social Security - scaring voters about what Republicans might do while presenting absolutely no plan in rebuttal.
Or eliminating the whole program altogether, which is what I would advocate.
But in the spirit of the thread, and having heard yesterday that Bush has announced a plan to balance the budget by 2012, I’ve decided to announce a plan for the Straight Dope to eradicate ignorance by 2015. I should be long gone from the board by then, and therefore if my plan fails, it is no fault of mine.
By manageable, you mean insane, right?
Manageable, and yet unmanaged. Imagine.
Seems to me I’ve heard “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” quite a bit from you guys over the years.
I’m going to invoke the name, so be prepared. You all know what name I’m talking about. Yes, it’s William Jefferson Clinton. This is not a “b-b-but… Clinton did it!” rebuttal, because I do believe that the current administration has been fiscally irresponsible.
Nonetheless, politicians have a tradition of “fixing” things on their way out the door. Clinton is, of course, the most recent example of this. You all remember when “the budget was balanced” and there was talk of a “surplus”? I know you do. Well, in the fashion of all politicians, that “surplus” was predicted for years in the future, barring no changes, no major events, and only if the full moon occurred on a cloudless night in Egypt in the year 2004 with and only if the sun and the moon were at precise angles in relation to the earth at the proper second. In other words, projections don’t mean shit. Liberal got it exactly right above. President Bush’s proposed “fix” is as elusive as everybody else’s proposed “fix”. In this case it all depends upon whose ox is being gored, and that’s what this is really all about.
And yet, if not for Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and his Iraq war, the budget would *still * be in surplus.