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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (6931)	6/30/2003 10:50:53 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15516

The Money Magnet By BOB HERBERT The New York Times June 23, 2003 It's a great time to be George W. Bush. The president will waltz into Manhattan today for another $2,000-a- plate fund-raiser, the latest stop on his fabulously successful dining-for-dollars tour. These are fun events at which the fat cats throw millions of dollars at the president to reinforce their already impenetrable ring of influence around the national government. Mr. Bush is expected to pull in $5 million at this evening's sit-down, and may ultimately raise an astonishing quarter of a billion dollars for his re-election bid. During a brief stop Friday at a reception in Greensboro, Ga., where he picked up a quick $2.2 million, the president happily told his supporters, "You put the wind at my back." I'm sure there's no connection between fat-cat fund-raising and, say, federal tax policy. But there was some particularly interesting information about the Bush tax cuts in an article yesterday by The Times's David E. Rosenbaum. Citing data from a study by Citizens for Tax Justice, Mr. Rosenbaum pointed out that the richest 1 percent of Americans will get an average tax reduction of nearly $100,000 a year, while "the tax relief most people will receive is quite meager." Half of all taxpayers will get a cut of less than $100 this year. By 2005, three-quarters will get less than $100. The middle class and working people don't seem to mind that they've been blithely left behind. Mr. Bush's approval ratings are way high, so high they've got the terminally timid Democrats scared to death to confront the president head on. The man who elbowed his way into the White House with a minority of the popular vote is on a roll. But while these may be the best of times for George W., this is not such a great moment for America. Start anywhere. Tax cuts? Mr. Bush has behaved like a profligate parent who spends every dollar the family has accumulated, mortgages everything the family owns and maxes out every credit card he can get his hands on. At some point in this scenario the children and grandchildren will be left with nothing but a mountain of debt. Jobs? More than three million private-sector jobs have been lost on this president's watch. People are staying out of work longer and the pay gains of the late 90's are being eroded. Time Magazine recently asked, "Why are American workers dying the death of a thousand pay cuts?" Government services? Prepare to wave goodbye to Medicare and Social Security as you've known them. Right wingers have always wanted to cripple the government's social service programs and now they are racing toward achievement of that poisonous goal. With the president's tax cuts bankrupting the government, there will be no money left for meaningful support of even the most popular social programs. The environment? Among other things, the Bush White House does not like global warming. So it just edits out, eliminates, erases important references to it in official government documents. Gas-guzzling S.U.V.'s are good. But in the Bush II White House, global warming as most scientists know it doesn't even exist. We've got some waking up to do. A budget catastrophe is hammering state and local governments across the country, driving up taxes and fees, and driving out important government services. This story is still not getting the attention it deserves. Some public school districts have had to shorten the school year because they ran out of money. In some areas medical services to seriously ill individuals are being curtailed. In some jurisdictions, criminal offenders are being released from prison early, and some criminal laws are not being enforced because of a lack of funds. Because of cuts in the police budget, station houses in Portland, Ore., now close at night. These are not topics that will be explored in depth at this evening's presidential fund-raiser. And you can bet that there will not be any straight talk about the quagmire we are sinking into in Iraq, or the outlandish deceptions that the president employed to get us in there. No, this will be a fun evening filled with the sound of joyous plutocratic laughter. Mr. Bush will leave with his pockets bulging and the wind at his back. The reality of life in George Bush's America for working men and women, and for the poor, will be left for others to attend to, presumably in some post-Bush administration. nytimes.com Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

To: Mephisto who wrote (6931)	7/17/2003 10:00:09 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Record federal deficit forecast Dramatic increase over White House's earlier estimates for this year Sam Zuckerman, Chronicle Economics Writer Wednesday, July 16, 2003 sfgate.com The Bush administration forecast record budget deficits for the next two years Tuesday plus shortfalls lasting through 2008, stoking fears that government red ink could raise interest rates and damage the economy. The White House Office of Management and Budget projected that this year's deficit will reach $455 billion, $151 billion more than previously estimated. The deteriorating fiscal picture stems from a weak economy that reduces the government's tax revenue, a costly war in Iraq and the administration's tax cut package recently approved by Congress, officials said. In 2004, the White House said, the budget gap will rise to $475 billion, $168 billion more than expected, before starting to shrink again as the pace of economic growth picks up. Only a few years ago, the government ran surpluses amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The latest deficit projections add fuel to a simmering debate over the Bush administration's economic program. Administration critics warn that massive government borrowing needed to finance budget shortfalls would suck up capital and cause consumer and business interest rates to rise. Higher rates in turn could act as a drag that slows business and consumer spending and lowers economic growth. The administration's projections extend only through 2008. Next decade, though, federal outlays are set to rise sharply as baby boomers start collecting Social Security and Medicare. That could make the budget gap even bigger. "We are not considering the impact of these deficits in the longer term," said investment banker Peter Peterson, commerce secretary during the Nixon administration and co-founder of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan antideficit group. "I've been a Republican all my life, and we used to be known for fiscal stewardship. Why is there so little attention paid to the serious threat to this country?" Administration officials said tax cuts and spending on security are more important than deficits. "Although large in nominal terms and a legitimate subject of concern, these deficits are manageable if we continue pro-growth economic policies and exercise serious spending discipline," the White House argued in budget documents released Tuesday. In an appearance before a congressional committee Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that rising deficits could push interest rates higher and slow economic growth. He urged Congress to reduce deficits by controlling spending. In absolute terms, the deficits projected for 2003 and 2004 are the largest in history. But they aren't the biggest when measured as a percentage of the economy. Shortfalls this year and next will equal between 4 and 5 percent of the nation's total production of goods and services. During the Reagan administration two decades ago, the deficit got as high as 6 percent of economic output. Most economists believe that deficits can be helpful when business conditions are poor. The theory is that when business and consumer spending is weak, higher outlays by government can take up some of the slack. "They lift aggregate demand and help the economy grow at a faster pace," said Christopher Wiegand, an economist with financial services giant Citigroup. But problems arise when deficits continue year in and year out, through good times as well as bad. When the nation is prosperous, and households and businesses are clamoring for loans, the government can become an unwelcome competitor for credit. Beyond that, it's unclear how large deficits have to be before they significantly affect rates. "It's a gray area with sharp divisions among mainstream economists," Wiegand said. Economists at the Federal Reserve recently estimated that a $100 billion increase in projected deficits would prompt long-term interest rates, such as mortgages, to rise by roughly one-quarter percentage point. That's less than the amount long-term rates have risen since the Fed disappointed investors a few weeks ago by cutting short-term rates less than expected. In its latest projection, the Bush administration estimated that deficits would fall sharply beginning in 2005, dropping to $213 billion in 2007 and then rising slightly in 2008. The smaller deficits will reflect faster economic growth and a winding down of Iraq war costs, officials said. Congressional Democrats accused the White House of underestimating future deficits by discounting future security costs and including unrealistic spending cuts. They noted previous Bush White House forecasts had come grossly short in projecting the size of deficits. Despite the politicking, rising federal deficits haven't become a powerful political issue the way they were in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the last 25 years, American politics has gone through a major realignment: Republicans moved from a balanced-budget to a tax-cutting agenda. "People have become desensitized to big deficits because in the 1980s there were a lot of false claims about how ruinous they were going to be," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group. "When Concord Coalition types said this was going to be economic Armageddon, it was a case of the politician who cried wolf." Still, deficits could rise higher on the political radar screen if the economy remains lackluster and jobs stay hard to find. "It's a risk for Bush to be running these big deficits," Moore said. "They keep on going up and up.

To: Mephisto who wrote (6931)	8/4/2003 7:15:45 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

State of Decline The New York Times August 1, 2003 By PAUL KRUGMAN From smog to silicon, from the sexual revolution to the tax revolt, the future has usually arrived in California first. Now the Golden State is degenerating into a banana republic. Can the nation be far behind? The recall isn't just a case of hardball politics. It's also a grand act of evasion: in the face of a severe fiscal crisis, voters are being invited to focus not on hard choices but on personality. Replacing Gray Davis with someone more likable isn't going to pay the bills. And California's slide into irresponsibility, in which politicians refuse to acknowledge any connection between the government services the public demands and the taxes that pay for those services, is being replicated all across America. Thanks to the end of the tech boom and the bursting of the tech bubble - with an assist from energy price gouging - California's budget has plunged into deficit. State and local governments faced with deficits normally respond with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. That's what Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done in New York, it's what Gov. Pete Wilson did in California's last fiscal crisis, in the early 1990's, and it's what Mr. Davis proposed earlier this year. But California's Constitution requires that budgets be passed in the State Legislature by a two-thirds' margin - which gives the Republican minority blocking power. And that minority has refused either to vote for any tax increase, or to make realistic proposals for spending cuts. You often hear claims that excessive spending is responsible for California's budget woes. True, budgets grew rapidly after the mid-1990's. But California began the 1990's by slashing outlays in response to a fiscal crisis, and most of the subsequent growth was simply a return to pre-crisis levels. As analysts at the nonpartisan California Budget Project point out, real state spending per capita was only 10 percent higher in 2002-03 than it was in 1989-90 - that is, most of the spending growth was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation. The key factor in rising California spending has been the effort to rebuild a crippled education system. Proposition 13, the 1978 cap on property taxes, led to a progressive starvation of California's once-lauded public schools. By 1994, the state had the largest class sizes in the nation; its reading scores were on a par with Mississippi's. Voters wanted this shameful situation remedied. Indeed, much of the recent growth of education spending was mandated by a rather complex measure called Proposition 98. So when conservatives denounce "runaway government spending" in California, what they're really talking about is the effort to hire more teachers and repair decrepit school buildings. Still, now the state faces a huge deficit, and spending must be cut. But shouldn't the state also seek more revenue? During California's last crisis, Governor Wilson increased the sales tax and temporarily raised income taxes on top brackets. This time Governor Davis proposed doing more or less the same thing - but Senate Republicans refused to go along. Their counterproposal relied entirely on spending cuts - but, tellingly, offered no specifics about what, exactly, should be cut. This week the stalemate was finally resolved, sort of. The budget that was passed contains one significant tax increase, a rise in the vehicle licensing fee - for technical reasons, this didn't require a vote. And it uses elaborate fiscal footwork to evade restrictions on state borrowing, passing the problem on until next year. It's better than no budget at all, but it's a monument to political irresponsibility. Which brings me to the final point: is Washington any better than Sacramento? Outside the Social Security system, the federal government is now running a deficit equal to a third of its spending - worse than California. The administration says it will never, ever contemplate increasing taxes; it says it will narrow the deficit through spending restraint, but has never said what spending it intends to restrain. If the federal government isn't in crisis, that's only because - unlike state governments - it isn't obliged to balance its budget each year. And so far bond markets have been willing to give the feds the benefit of the doubt. But the people now running the country are every bit as irresponsible as those blocking a serious response to California's crisis. And sooner or later that irresponsibility will have the usual consequences. California, here we come. nytimes.com Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

To: Mephisto who wrote (6931)	10/15/2003 12:04:42 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

America on the economic watch list Paul Krugman NYT Wednesday, October 15, 2003 PRINCETON, New Jersey During the 1990's I spent much of my time focusing on economic crises around the world - in particular, on currency crises like those that struck Southeast Asia in 1997 and Argentina in 2001. The timing of such crises is hard to predict. But there are warning signs, like big trade and budget deficits and rising debt burdens. And there's one thing I can't help noticing: a Third World country with America's recent numbers - its huge budget and trade deficits, its growing reliance on short-term borrowing from the rest of the world - would definitely be on the watch list. I'm not the only one thinking that. The brokerage firm Lehman Brothers has a mathematical model known as Damocles that it calls "an early warning system to identify the likelihood of countries entering into financial crises." Developing nations are looking pretty safe these days. But applying the same model to some advanced countries "would set Damocles' alarm bells ringing." Lehman's press release adds, "Most conspicuous of these threats is the United States." Let's run through some reassuring counterarguments. First, economists are very good at devising models that would have predicted past crises, but each new crisis tends to happen where and when they didn't expect it. So even though the U.S. budget deficit is bigger relative to the economy than Argentina's in 2000, and the U.S. trade deficit is bigger relative to the economy than Indonesia's in 1996, the American experience needn't be the same. Second, nasty crises in Third World countries have a lot to do with the fact that their debt is in foreign currency, usually dollars. As a result, when the peso or the rupiah plunges, debts explode while assets don't, and balance sheets collapse. By contrast, thanks to the special international role of the dollar, America's burgeoning foreign debt is in its own currency. Finally, financial markets are generally willing to give advanced countries the benefit of the doubt. Even when an advanced country seems to be deep in a financial hole, lenders usually assume that it will somehow find the resources and political will to climb back out. So is America safe, despite its scary numbers? Third World countries typically suffer from institutional weaknesses. They have poor corporate governance: You can't trust business accounting, and insiders often enrich themselves at stockholders' expense. Meanwhile, cronyism is rampant, with close personal and financial links between powerful politicians and the very companies that benefit from public largess. Luckily, in America we don't have any of these weaknesses. Oh, wait. (Isn't that all history? No. According to The Wall Street Journal, we are again hearing warnings that "optimism is based on massaged earnings.") Still, there's no question that the United States has the resources to climb out of its financial hole. The question is whether it has the political will. There is now a huge structural gap - that is, a gap that won't go away even if the economy recovers - between spending and revenue. For the time being, borrowing can fill that gap. But eventually there must be either a large tax increase or major cuts in popular programs. If the American political system can't bring itself to choose one alternative or the other - and so far the commander in chief refuses even to admit that America has a problem - the United States will eventually face a nasty financial crisis. The crisis won't come immediately. For a few years, America will still be able to borrow freely, simply because lenders assume that things will somehow work out. But at a certain point we'll have a Wile E. Coyote moment. For those not familiar with the Road Runner cartoons, Coyote had a habit of running off cliffs and taking several steps on thin air before noticing that there was nothing underneath his feet. Only then would he plunge. What will that plunge look like? It will certainly involve a sharp fall in the dollar and a sharp rise in interest rates. In the worst-case scenario, the government's access to borrowing will be cut off, creating a cash crisis that throws the United States into chaos. I know: It all sounds unbelievable. But would you have believed, three years ago, that the budget would plunge so quickly from a record surplus to a record deficit? And would you have believed that, confronted with that plunge, America's leaders would offer excuses rather than solutions? E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (6931)	11/6/2003 11:48:40 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

The U.S. debt just can't keep growing By Paul Krugman (NYT) Wednesday, November 5, 2003 PRINCETON, New Jersey: Academic economists often cite Stein's Law, a principle enunciated by the late Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Nixon administration. The law comes with various wordings; my favorite is: "Things that can't go on forever, don't." Believe it or not, that's a useful reminder. For we Americans are now led by men who think that macho posturing makes Stein's Law go away. On issues ranging from budgets to foreign policy, they insist that the United States can sustain the unsustainable. And when challenged to explain how, they engage in magical thinking. The prime example I have hammered on in this column is, of course, the federal budget. Realistic budget projections say that current policies aren't remotely sustainable. For example, a month ago a joint report of the Committee for Economic Development (a business group), the bipartisan Concord Coalition and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that under current policies, federal debt would rise by $5 trillion over the next decade. And then baby boomers will start collecting benefits, and the debt will really explode. Such explosive growth in America's debt can't go on forever, and it won't. Yet our current leaders and their apologists insist that the problem will magically solve itself. Last year's deficit came in slightly below forecasts, and we've had one quarter of good economic growth - see, we'll grow out of the deficit! But we won't, and there will eventually be a day of reckoning. As Bill Gross of Pimco, the giant bond manager, says, "Sooner, perhaps later, our Asian creditors will wake up and smell the coffee." (Yes, the federal budget and the value of the dollar now depend on huge purchases of Treasury bills by the governments of Japan and China.) When they do, he predicts "higher import costs, a cutback in spending on cheap foreign goods, rising inflation, perhaps chaotic financial markets, a lower standard of living." Something to look forward to. But the day of reckoning seems closer on a different front. Some Americans may share the views of the Republican congressman who said that progress in Iraq is "a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day." (Support the troops!) But whether or not you think troop losses are important, there's growing evidence that the U.S. Iraq strategy is unsustainable. The immediate issue is manpower. Some politicians are calling for a bigger force in Iraq - but even the current force levels can't be maintained. In September the Congressional Budget Office analyzed how many U.S. soldiers could be kept in Iraq without extending tours beyond one year. The conclusion was that force levels would have to start dropping rapidly about five months from now, and that the forces in Iraq and Kuwait would eventually have to shrink by almost two-thirds. As the report explains, the Pentagon can use various expedients to maintain a larger force in Iraq, but all of these expedients would threaten to undermine military readiness. At a broader level, the accelerating pace at which Americans are being killed and wounded and the strains of occupation duties clearly pose difficulties for recruitment in a volunteer military. And at a still broader level, public support for this war - whose original rationale has turned out to be a mirage, if not a deliberate deception - will wilt if losses go on at this rate, no matter how tough the president talks. For sure, good things are happening in Iraq. But are we making the kind of progress that would allow us to withdraw large numbers of soldiers, and greatly reduce casualties, in the fairly near future? That's a hard case to make. Yet we keep expecting a magic solution. We'll get European, Indian and Pakistani forces to help us! But since we went to war without international support, they're not interested. We'll bring in the Turks! But the Iraqi Governing Council itself is bitterly opposed. We'll engage in "Iraqification," creating local forces that take the place of American troops! Let's hope that works - but hope is not a plan. Just as the federal government is in no immediate danger of running out of money, U.S. forces in Iraq are in no danger of outright defeat. But in both cases, current policies appear to be unsustainable: we can't go on like this indefinitely. And things that can't go on forever, don't. E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (6931)	9/4/2004 7:05:13 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Bush Plans Could Raise U.S. Deficits The New York Times September 4, 2004 By LOUIS UCHITELLE President Bush promised in his nomination acceptance speech to improve the lives of millions of Americans by expanding a variety of existing programs, but neither he nor his aides explained how they would pay for the proposals, some of which promised to accelerate the budget deficit over the next decade. "We have cost estimates and those will be put forward in the coming weeks and months,'' said Trent Duffy, the deputy White House press secretary, declining to offer details. Whatever the costs, the proposals would not go to Congress for approval until February or March, when the presidential budget for the 2006 fiscal year is published. That year begins 13 months from now. Congress has not approved a budget for the fiscal year 2005, which starts in three and a half weeks. Mr. Bush proposed spending increases in that budget, but last spring the Office of Management and Budget instructed federal offices and agencies to cut spending in the requests they submitted for the 2006 budget. "We can't tell whether the president is now reversing course and actually planning to devote more resources to the areas mentioned in his speech,'' said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "or whether he will remain with temporary increases now to be followed by substantial cuts in such areas as education and job training.'' In his speech Thursday night, Mr. Bush said he would expand job training programs "to help workers take advantage of the expanding economy to find better and higher-paying jobs.'' That would be a shift in policy: During the Bush years, money for a central part of the program, the retraining of millions of laid-off workers, has remained essentially unchanged at about $4 billion annually. The most expensive proposals offered tax breaks for three types of savings accounts and various tax credits for health care. These would add roughly $50 billion to $100 billion to the $2.4 trillion in tax cuts now projected over the next decade, Mr. Greenstein estimated. But the trend would continue to be toward sheltering the income of wealthy people and putting more of the tax burden on wage earners. During the Bush years, the tax rate on wages and on income from investments has declined, but the decline for investment income is roughly 4 percentage points while that for workers is 2 points, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. "Some of the president's proposals at the Republican convention may not have immediate fiscal effects, but they are radical changes in the system of taxation that we have,'' said Peter Orszag, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a special assistant on economic policy in the Clinton administration. The Bush administration, in a second term, would provide tax incentives to set up three types of savings accounts. A health savings account would encourage people to pay for their own health care out of these accounts, though the estimated tax breaks would be less than the actual average cost of health care, according to most estimates. A new retirement savings account would in effect replace traditional I.R.A.'s. And a lifetime savings account would shelter up to $7,500 a year for each individual in a household, or $30,000 for a family of four. The savings and interest could be withdrawn at any time tax-free. The retirement accounts might raise revenue initially, Mr. Greenstein said, as people cash out I.R.A.'s and switch the funds to the new accounts. New money going into these accounts would not be deductible and tax revenue would also rise as a result. But none of the earnings would be taxable and that would cut into tax revenue in later years. As for lifetime savings accounts, the accumulated tax savings for a wealthy family putting $30,000 a year into these accounts would increasingly shift the tax burden to wage earners, according to critics. Concerning education, Mr. Bush said he would increase testing and reward teachers when their students do well, a proposal that Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, has also made. In particular, the president proposed spending $250 million more to require more statewide exams in reading and math and $200 million to monitor the progress of incoming high school students. The increase would be significantly more than what the administration has requested in recent years, though experts deemed it far short of what it would take to conduct more standardized tests nationwide. "It seemed like the right rhetoric, but not the right solution," said Keith Gayler, associate director for the Center on Education Policy, which generally supports testing. "This seems woefully underfunded and if it is not well funded, it will probably cause more harm than good." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company nytimes.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (6931)	10/15/2004 3:01:56 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

2004 Deficit Hits Record $214 Billion Thu Oct 14, 4:21 PM ET story.news.yahoo.com By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - The federal deficit surged to a record $413 billion in 2004, the Treasury Department announced Thursday, injecting the figure into a presidential campaign in which the two parties have clashed over President Bush (news - web sites)'s management of the economy and the budget. The number was a significant improvement from the shortfalls that analysts projected earlier this year, including a $521 billion estimate the Bush administration made in February. In March, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites) estimated a deficit of $477 billion. Both the administration and the Congressional Budget Office had lowered their deficit forecasts as the year progressed, due to stronger than expected revenue collections and lower spending. Even so, the final deficit figure easily surpassed the previous record in dollar terms - a revised $377 billion deficit that was run up last year. The government's 2004 budget year ran through Sept. 30. In a statement, Treasury Secretary John Snow cited improving economic data and said the budgetary improvement shows Bush is on track to cut the deficit in half over five years as he has promised. "All of this shows that the president's tax relief initiatives are having the intended effects," Snow said. Democrats disagreed. "There is simply no credible way to present the largest deficit in history as good news," said Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. "The Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House, but today's news proves again they have failed to control the budget." The government spent $2.292 trillion last year and collected $1.88 trillion in revenue, the Treasury Department said. The administration and congressional Republicans have discounted the significance of a deficit of this magnitude. They say the more important measure is that the 2004 shortfall was an estimated 3.6 percent the size of the economy, well below the worst-ever 6 percent figure set in 1983 under President Reagan. Many economists agree that comparison is more significant because it shows how affordable the deficit is for the nation. But many of them are uncomfortable with shortfalls of that size because the deficits are expected to worsen later this decade when the huge baby boom generation begins drawing on Social Security (news - web sites) and Medicare. The Treasury released the final deficit figure the same day it announced that the government has begun using accounting procedures to avoid hitting the $7.4 trillion national debt limit. Snow made that announcement in a letter to Congress. Lawmakers have yet to pass legislation needed to boost the government's borrowing authority, which now stands at a statutory limit of $7.4 trillion. "Given current projections, it is imperative that the Congress take action to increase the debt limit by mid-November," when "all of our previously used prudent and legal actions to avoid breaching the statutory debt limit will be exhausted," Snow wrote House and Senate leaders of both parties. When the government runs an annual deficit, it must borrow money to finance its operations, driving its accumulated debt ever higher.