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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: haqihana who wrote (282621)	8/1/2002 10:23:43 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

You are right. The surplus was phony, but not because of 'projected profits'... rather it was because of smoke and mirrors accounting. So many of the government's future obligations (for example: Social Security, and other transfer programs) have been moved 'off the books' ever since the Reagan administration, that if the US government was forced to abide by GAAP accounting standards like American corporations - then the 'surplus' of 2000 would turn into a deficit of 1/2 Trillion dollars (per the figures the Treasury Dept. posted on their Web site). Other common tricks include things like robbing from trust funds (such as the Highway Trust Fund) to cover current account deficits. The greater problem is that nothing has changed in government's fraudulent accounting practices. Those same smoke and mirror tricks the US has been using for decades are still with us in today's federal budget. The federal deficit is even worse today though than it was in 2000. An honest GAAP accounting today might show a deficit of 3/4 Trillion dollars for this tax year. The President's projected budget figures for future years are made even more dishonest than usual because of the highly unrealistic growth numbers that they presume... as confirmed by both GAO and the Republican led CBO. That was the one redeeming feature of the Clinton era budgets... they generally contained conservative economic projections, unlike the one's being put forth by the Bush administration which no one believes (not even their fellow Republicans).