[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
The fact is that the budget deficit has been pretty manageable for quite a while now.
[/QUOTE]
Congratulations. This is the stupidest thing ever written. No exaggeration. No hyperbole. Simply the stupidest thing written since man first poked in the wet sand with a stick. 8 trillion dollars growing at another 300 billion per year.
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
And yet, if not for Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and his Iraq war, the budget would *still * be in surplus.
[/QUOTE]
…and I would be a rich man if I hadn’t had a kid, wrecked my car, saved every little penny I made and never had to pay a bill in my life. So what?
The point is that the budget changes with every administration, with every shift in policy, with every major event that occurs, and even with some not-so-major events. Projections are worthless.
[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
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.
[/QUOTE]
I think this is a mischaracterization of Clinton’s budget policy. His policy was one of deficict reduction, and his administration tended to use conservative figures. What happened is that the economy did so well, that income exceeded the projections, and the budget went into surplus. That’s a happenstance of his policy, which was far more responsible than Bush’s.
[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
…and I would be a rich man if I hadn’t had a kid, wrecked my car, saved every little penny I made and never had to pay a bill in my life. So what?
[/quote]
So the deficits aren’t just a fact of life, but the direct consequences of policy decisions made, with no possibility of reconsideration, by the current President, is what.
Things rarely “just happen”.
[QUOTE=RedFury]
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 – . . .
[/QUOTE]
From your lips . . .
(Or typing fingers. Whatever.)
[QUOTE=Giraffe]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Look on the bright side. It would have given a boost to Wall Street! 
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Look on the bright side. It would have given a boost to Wall Street!
[/QUOTE]
The thing is, I’m not opposed to the idea of some degree of privatization of Social Security, if set up properly. But it’s completely unrelated to the actual problem, namely that we aren’t going to have enough money under the current system to pay for the promised benefits.
Instead of actually fixing the problem, Congress has continually elected to play chicken, each trying to force the other guy to use the phrase “raise taxes” or “cut benefits” and reap the outrage while they stand on the sidelines shaking their heads at how much the other party loves raising taxes and/or screwing old people. It’s retarded.
[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Aside from emboldening the enemy, this administration has been grossly irresponsible. If you really think that the looming threat on the horizon is the entitlement balloon then racking up husge national debt isn’t exactly the best response yet nearly the entire national debt can be attributed to deficits run during Republican adminsitrations. If we didn’t have a national debt then we probably wouldn’t have a huge problem with entitlement bubbles, we could float it until we digested the baby boom bubble.
One of the largest budget items is the debt service on the national debt, this is entirely a Republican creation, the Democrats tend to balance their spending with current increases in taxation, the Republicans tend to borrow money and then hoot and holler about how they have lowered taxes (for the time being at least).
The problem I have with this budget is the priorities. We are cutting services in order to make room for tax cuts and the war in Iraq.