Is Mr. Bush (The MISleader) a real "Compassionate Conservative"...?
-It's not compassionate to FAIL to fully fund a program like "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND"...
Every Child Left Behind: Three Years of Unfunded Mandates
democrats.org
-It's clearly NOT conservative to rack up the biggest federal deficit in history...
In just three short years, President Bush's reckless tax cuts for the wealthy have turned record surpluses into record deficits...
CBO chief sees 2004 U.S. budget gap below $450 billion
reuters.com
<<...In 2003, the government ran up a record tide of red ink, $374 billion, overtaking the 1992 record of $290 set by the first President George Bush.
Talking to reporters after his testimony, Holtz-Eakin said much of the change in the budget picture came from a one-time gain of between $20 billion and $30 billion in revenues that took the form of smaller tax refunds this spring.
"The remainder is just a little stronger withholding in the corporate side and also on the personal side," he said.
Holtz-Eakin declined to put a floor on the deficit projection, but said he was not expecting "a big number in terms of shock value" in the upcoming projections.
"The big wild card has always been how fast money gets spent in some of these Iraq accounts," he said...>>
Team Bush's Clueless New Math
businessweek.com
dean-justinspoliticaljournal.cafeprogressive.com
Why Deficits Matter
washingtonpost.com
Why Deficits Matter
Washington Post Editorial
Sunday, July 20, 2003
<<...WHEN BUSH ADMINISTRATION officials discuss the deficit, they make it sound like a problem on the scale of a particularly persistent case of fiscal dandruff. "Manageable," Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten told a House hearing. "A concern," the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, wrote in The Post. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow ventured about as far out as any administration official, but he left the country to do it, telling a London audience that the new deficit numbers were "worrisome." And so, let's depart from our usual style on rendering numbers to consider exactly what "manageable" looks like. This year's deficit is projected to be $455 billion. That's $455,000,000,000. Over the next five years, the administration estimates, the cumulative deficits will total $1.9 trillion. That's $1,900,000,000,000.
Deficits such as these matter because the increased government borrowing creates a drag on the economy; it reduces the amount of capital available for private investment and consequently the increased national income that would result from greater investment. As Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee last week, "There is no question that if you run substantial and excessive deficits over time, you are draining savings from the private sector, and other things equal, you do clearly undercut the growth rate of the economy." The problem occurs because -- as the administration, which tried for a while to argue this Economics 101 point, now concedes -- the greater competition for capital drives up interest rates. Mr. Mankiw summed this up nicely in his best-selling economics textbook: "When the government reduces national saving by running a budget deficit, the interest rate rises, and investment falls. Because investment is important for long-run economic growth, government budget deficits reduce the economy's growth rate."
Deficits matter, as well, because the increased borrowing means the government has to spend even more on interest costs, which already account for a sizable chunk of government spending. That's made even worse by the deficit-driven increase in interest rates. This year, for example, the administration expects to pay $156 billion in interest -- three times what the federal government spends on education. By 2008 interest costs are projected to be $260 billion, more than half the total budget ($461 billion) for non-defense discretionary spending...>>
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Bush agenda is a ‘cloud over civilization’
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People Before Profits
Author: David Eisenhower
People's Weekly World Newspaper
07/22/04 13:44
pww.org
The Bush administration governs from a script commissioned by oil, finance and military interests. According to John Kenneth Galbraith, these corporate interests represent “a cloud over civilization.”
The key features of the Republican strategy are massive tax cuts for the wealthy and severe increases in budget deficits; permanent war and a sharp increase in military spending; and seizure of the world’s oil reserves.
Professor Michael Klare, one of the world’s experts on the geopolitics of oil, recently wrote “Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel. Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan and China. It’s having our hand on the spigot.”
Jim Lobe, long time foreign policy analyst, has written extensively on U.S. military redeployment into the world’s oil-rich regions in order to “enforce a Pax Americana, based on an ability to exert unilateral military control over the production and flow of energy resources from Central Asia, the Gulf region and the coast of West Africa in the face in potential rivals.”
And Robert Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, views oil as the fuel of military power, national treasuries and international politics. “It’s no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of well-being, of national security, and international power.”
Tax cuts are good news for those Bush refers to as his “base”: millionaires. A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently concluded the wealthy, with income over $1,000,000, will receive an average tax cut of $136,398. However, the bottom four-fifths, those with incomes below $76,400, “would lose more than they gain from the tax cuts once the necessary financing is taken into account.”
The sharp decline in corporate taxes has little to do with lack of profits. Profits are at record levels, but rather than invest in new jobs corporations are using their record revenues in dividend pay-outs and stock share repurchases, while outsourcing jobs to low wage, export zones around the world.
The whole point of tax cuts was never about job formation. It was merely part of a cynical strategy “to starve the beast,” in the words of Republican Party strategist Grover Norquist, to use budget deficits as the rational to radically scale back government social programs while transferring tax revenues to the owners of the national debt.
Bill Moyers, in a speech titled “The Fight of Our Lives,” exposes the Republican efforts to return government to the golden age of “compassionate conservatism,” before Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society program. Summing up Moyer said, “Let’s face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs – if this isn’t class war, what is?”
According to the ultra-right, only three things matter: a permanent war against “terrorism,” who gets to vote and whose vote is counted.
Never mind that:
• one-quarter to one-third of adults under 35 have no insurance.
• jobless claims are rising much faster than expected, and inner city unemployment rates exceed 25 percent.
• the projected federal budget deficit went from a $5.6 trillion surplus in 2001 to a projected $5.5 trillion deficit in the next 10 years.
• unemployment rate reached 9.7 percent in May when discouraged workers are counted.
• 43 million Americans lack health care.
• U.S. prison population is the world’s largest.
• there is a surge in homeless families.
• trade deficit grew to a record $48.3 billion in April.
The Democratic Party Convention priorities have to reject permanent war, adopt a platform that puts people before profits and create an action plan to guarantee the integrity of the 2004 elections. |
