George Bush's budget: An election-year farce
economist.com
" Mr Bush has betrayed the vision of Ronald Reagan with a “big-government conservatism” that has increased spending wildly."
"For a start, the budget does not factor in the future costs of keeping soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan: even Mr Bush's own budget director says costs could be as much as $50 billion for Iraq alone in 2005."
" Mr Bush's most culpable failing lies in his refusal to think beyond the 2009 horizon. Take, first, the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which Mr Bush wants to make permanent at a ten-year cost, when other new proposals for tax-free savings schemes are added in, of $1.25 trillion. The cuts may well have provided a welcome economic stimulus at a time when confidence was knocked by recession and terrorist attack. But after 2009, these cuts will equal three-quarters of the total deficit, even by the administration's own numbers.
This matters, because soon after that date, some very predictable things happen, thanks to a demographic bulge as the baby-boom generation reaches retirement. The surplus on government-retirement accounts, which currently subsidises federal spending by over $250 billion a year, will vanish. The costs of Medicare, the health programme for the elderly, will soar. Mr Bush has aggravated the problem by pushing through a Medicare prescriptions law whose ten-year cost has now jumped to $530 billion. The idea that Mr Bush will ever tackle these issues—even in a second term—looks fanciful." |
