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

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (756761)	1/3/2007 11:11:48 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Bush Says Plan Would Balance Budget by ’12 January 3, 2007 By EDMUND L. ANDREWS nytimes.com WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — President Bush said on Tuesday that he would propose a plan that he insists would, if followed, achieve a balanced budget by 2012, the most optimistic he has been in at least five years, and he said the goal could be achieved without rescinding any of his big tax cuts. In an op-ed article for the Wednesday issue of the The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bush said his budget proposal for the 2008 fiscal year would for the first time project a deficit that disappears. “The bottom line is tax relief and spending restraint are good for the American worker, good for the American taxpayer, and good for the federal budget,” Mr. Bush said in the article, which was online Tuesday night. “Now is not the time to raise taxes on the American people.” Mr. Bush offered no specifics on how he intends to achieve a balanced budget, beyond declaring that his tax cuts had led to economic growth and generated large increases in tax revenue for the past two years. The White House’s most recent budget forecast, issued last summer, called for the deficit to decline to $127 billion in 2011 from its peak of $412 billion in 2004. Thanks to larger-than-expected revenue gains last year, the shortfall for 2006 declined to $248 billion. During his re-election campaign in 2004, Mr. Bush promised to cut the deficit in half by 2009. Though the prediction was greeted with widespread skepticism, that goal now looks increasingly plausible even if war costs in Iraq continue at current levels for another year. Mr. Bush gave no hint in the article about whether the goal of a balanced budget by 2012 was predicated on continued rapid growth in tax revenues or deep new spending cuts in domestic programs. But Mr. Bush’s budget plans in the past several years have consistently failed to take into account two major costs in the years ahead: the war in Iraq and the cost of restraining or repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax. War costs are now more than $100 billion a year, and Mr. Bush is expected to ask Congress for a supplemental spending package of more than $110 billion to finance military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The alternative minimum tax is a potentially more costly item. The tax, which was created to prevent rich taxpayers from making too much use of elaborate deductions, is rapidly expanding its reach into the middle class because it is not adjusted for inflation. Mr. Bush and Democratic leaders have called for a permanent “fix” to the alternative minimum tax, but an outright repeal would cost about $1 trillion over the next 10 years. For the past several years, Mr. Bush and the Congress have kept the tax from expanding by passing a series of one-year measures that could cost more than $70 billion for next year alone. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (756761)	1/3/2007 2:35:52 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Clowns & Harlots: Nimrods By Christopher Corbett The Taipan Group's Dynamic Market Alert Last week I read an AP story out of Idaho about some spot of controversy over a private ranch where high rollers pay big bucks to shoot big game. It’s called “canned-hunting.” Hunting purists decry this sort of thing as not sporting and a debasement of real hunting. I’ll go along with that. Shooting an animal that’s been raised at a game farm ain’t hunting. Most people would be embarrassed to admit that they shot some critter under those circumstances. But as the AP story pointed out, many are not. It’s a big business making sure that someone who can’t seem to cut it in the wild gets a trophy. As a native of Maine, the most rural state east of the Mississippi -- where hunting is an industry -- I have to say that I have some strong feelings about hunting. I am a traditionalist in the oldest sense of hunting. An old-fashioned hunter. I think hunting should be done completely on equal terms with the beasts of the forest and field as the Native Americano did in days of yore (before we pretty much wiped him out). I oppose the use of firearms. Actually I oppose the use of any weapon other than something a hunter can devise himself, like a spear or homemade bow and arrow. Throwing rocks would be OK, too. I also think that hunting should be done in the nude. My feeling is that if a naked man can run a deer down and subdue it with his bare hands he is entitled to all the venison he can eat. I would eliminate hunting season too. Hunt year-round. Hunt anywhere. Hunt anytime. Hunt at night. But no guns or manufactured weapons. That is to make the hunt entirely fair and to make the huntentirely traditional. This is in keeping with the blather I read from some so-called hunters. You often hear nimrods -- to use the Biblical term -- pronounce on the sanctity of the hunt. It is an ancient and primitive rite that draws man back to his deepest roots, they say. Amen, brother. Let him do it as his wild predecessors did. Nude or festooned in the skins of beasts taken in the hunt. Otherwise NO HUNTING. This would eliminate hunting accidents. In my home state of Maine, a greenhorn in the throes of buck fever has been known to shoot a housewife off her back porch mistaking her for a deer. The fault there was the high-powered rifle. You can make a mistake with a high-powered rifle and kill someone at a distance but a housewife on her back porch would be in no real danger from a naked man running across a field trying to catch a deer. No one would ever be accidentally shot because no firearms would be involved. No one would shoot someone’s Holstein and say they thought it was a deer. If you chased a Holstein you would soon realize it warn’t no deer. Firearms used to hunt often find themselves in the hands of miscreants. But that would not be a big problem because we would no longer have much of a firearm industry since you would not need a gun to hunt. I would also allow hunting on the Sabbath, for I believe that the Lord would understand. Again, the hunt must be, as we so often hear, pure. I would make it as pure as it was in the days of Cro-Magnon man. Take to the fields and forests in the raw. Buck nekkid. This would cull the dilettante from the herd, so to speak. Only a person with a deep desire to hunt would go out in cold weather to hunt au natural. And a hunter would have to be Boston Marathon material to run a whitetail down. Objections to hunting by organizations like PETA would disappear. No one would object to a hunter who hunted this way. It would be safe. Now naturally there would be some concessions. Hunting nude would probably mean that a lot less hunters were hunting and that would reduce hunting license fees, etc. So be it. One of the “hunters” in the AP story paid $8,000 to shoot a bull elk at a 1,200-acre fenced-in game farm (that’s about one and a half times the size of New York’s Central Park). Macho, macho man! What an adventure that must have been? The owner of the elk ranch told the AP that a lot of hunters were tired of competition in the wild (it’s easier to shoot farm-raised critters) and a lot of the competition came from wolves. Wolves? Wouldn’t that be part of the real fun of a hunt? Naked man armed with homemade spear meets wolf in the wild. Both are stalking an elk. Survival of the fittest. Now that’s what hunting is all about.