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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (4420)	2/28/2004 1:03:15 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 173976

President Bush's budget would produce deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projected Friday in the first authoritative look at the plan's longer-range implications. The forecast — $737 billion worse than the budget office expects should Congress ignore Bush's tax and spending plans — is sure to factor into this year's presidential and congressional campaigns. Bush sent lawmakers a $2.4 trillion budget for 2005 on Feb. 2, but it projected outward only for five years. The White House argues that longer-range forecasts are guesswork, but Democrats say the administration wants to hide future deficits that will careen out of control as baby boomers begin to retire. The nonpartisan budget office also forecast that Bush's fiscal plans would produce deficits of $478 billion this year and $356 billion in 2005. Both figures are smaller than the shortfalls Bush has projected for those years. For the decade ending in 2014, however, annual shortfalls never would be smaller than $242 billion, which would occur in 2007, the budget office said. After that, they would bounce as high as $289 billion in 2014. Last year's shortfall, which exceeded $374 billion, was the largest ever in dollar terms. "These are permanent, structural deficits we will never dig our way out of if we follow in the president's path," said Thomas Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee. White House budget spokesman Chad Kolton said there frequently are major differences when two organizations make long-range forecasts of entities as huge as the federal budget and the U.S. economy. But, he said, "Looking at the first five years of CBO's forecast, it shows we cut the deficit in half within five years" — one of Bush's budget goals. Two days ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan focused attention on the government's long-term fiscal problems by suggesting cuts in Social Security benefits to ease cascading red ink. Members of both parties quickly disavowed benefit reductions. Democrats, though, hope to use the prospect of massive, unrelenting shortfalls as a symbol of what they say is Bush's mismanagement of the economy. Republicans blame the red ink on recession and the costs of war and terror and say Bush has focused his attention on those problems instead of balancing the government's books. Yet underlining their sensitivity to the deficit problem, six conservative senators sent a letter this week asking Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., to produce a fiscal blueprint for balancing the budget in seven years. That would exceed Bush's goal of halving shortfalls in five years. One major item omitted by Bush's budget but included in Friday's projections was the cost of his proposal to make tax cuts permanent that otherwise would expire in 2010. Bush's tax plans would add more than $1.3 trillion to deficits over the decade, although his plans to curb domestic spending would save $700 billion over that same period, the budget office said. Wary of the impact on deficits, Republican congressional leaders already have said they will not move this year on Bush's proposal to extend the tax cuts, which is the pillar of his plan for strengthening the economy. The top two Democratic presidential contenders, Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina, have said they would roll back the reductions for the wealthiest Americans. Just two years ago, the budget office and Bush envisioned surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion for the decade ending in 2011. The projections released Friday cover a slightly different period, the 10 years running through 2014. Even so, the contrast is striking. usatoday.com

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (4420)	2/28/2004 1:11:22 AM
From: steve dietrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

I think it might take democratic control of congress just to redress the problems created by Republican dominatin of the govt. Normally, I also favor some balance of power between the parties.

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (4420)	2/28/2004 1:13:35 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

I wouldn't mind some republicans in congress either. A fair number of congresspeople are distancing themselves from Bush already. The fiscal disaster that is Bush has to be impossible to rationalize if you are republican.

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (4420)	2/28/2004 12:04:05 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

The Free-Lunch Bunch - (stealing from Social Security) The Bush team's secret plan to "reform" Social Security. By Ron Suskind Posted Friday, Feb. 27, 2004, at 4:27 PM PT slate.msn.com During the 2000 campaign, candidate George W. Bush seemed particularly confident about his ability to pay for Social Security reform. Despite independent estimates that creating the kind of "voluntarily" private accounts he envisioned could cost more than $1 trillion, Bush consistently took the position that he could reform Social Security for free, without undermining promises to baby boomers anticipating retirement over the next several decades. Why was Bush so sure of himself? According to documents unearthed yesterday from the trove of 19,000 files given to me by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and a bit of additional probing, candidate Bush and later President Bush believed in the "Lindsey Plan." These documents show us what the president thought about Social Security reform at the only moment over the past three years—the fall of 2001—when he was fully engaged with this issue. Larry Lindsey, Bush's tutor on economics during the campaign and later chairman of the White House's National Economic Council, devised a scheme based on creative accounting principles. Essentially, it proposed that the government would issue substantial new debt to sustain old-style benefits. This debt would be serviced and paid down by confiscating revenues from the higher returns from those opting for new-style personal accounts. Continue Article -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For the first nine months of the administration, this was called the "free-lunch" plan—a painless way to convert to a blended, private-accounts model. Inside of the Treasury Department and the Council of Economic Advisers, however, officials were befuddled by it. Lindsey seemed to have never called upon analysts inside the Social Security Administration to run the traps on his idea. Treasury and CEA did—and the numbers didn't even come close to working out. But that didn't stop Lindsey, or the president, from believing in and promoting the "free-lunch" plan. These two memos on RonSuskind.com, which have never before been released, show what Bush and others in the White House were actually thinking about Social Security reform. A bit of context: In October 2001, Bush was about to meet with the chairmen of his Social Security Commission before it began public deliberations. In preparation, the president needed to be briefed by his advisers about various options for reforming Social Security. The Council of Economic Advisers, headed by R. Glenn Hubbard, and the National Economic Council, headed by Lindsey, prepared a 17-page PowerPoint presentation for the president. As is clear from his faxed cover sheet, Hubbard wants to talk to O'Neill about that package before it is sent to Bush. O'Neill, however, receives the proposed 17-page briefing for Bush beneath a cover memo from Kent Smetters, a senior Treasury official and a leading specialist in Social Security reform. Smetters' memo sounds the alarm about Lindsey's free-lunch plan and reminds O'Neill of the central question: Is the president, he writes, "willing to live with benefit cuts (i.e. 'pain')?" O'Neill and Alan Greenspan favored a more robust shift to private accounts, where the old system would stay intact for most Americans—they came up with a cutoff age of 37—and younger participants would be offered only a new system: private accounts available to invest in index funds, both of bonds and equities. This proposal, which would have acknowledged "transition costs" of approximately $1 trillion, got little traction. On Dec. 21, the commission released its report illustrating a variety of blended approaches that included some element of private accounts. In the post-9/11 environment, the report vanished with little notice. But should the president take Greenspan's recent suggestion and instigate a debate about Social Security again, we will now have some idea what he means by "reform." Ron Suskind is the author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill.