Tuesday, February 03, 2004
More budget madness
From The Daily Mislead:
On the same day the White House unveiled its 2005 budget, President Bush calculatingly obscured the reason the nation now faces a record $500 billion deficit. He said, "The reason we are where we are, in terms of the deficit, is because we went through a recession, we were attacked, and we're fighting a war."
But according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the single biggest cause of the deficit is the president's massive tax cuts for the wealthy -- which he conveniently did not mention. Specifically, 36% of the deficit comes from the tax cuts, while only 31% comes from defense/war-related spending increases, and the rest comes from the economic slowdown. In fact the president actually acknowledged in last year's budget that the deficit is primarily his fault. Table S-3 of Bush's 2004 budget "shows unambiguously that the administration's fiscal 2004 budget proposes a massive annual increase in the deficit" and that without those proposals the nation would return to surplus. In other words, the president is falsely invoking national security, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the war in Iraq to hide the fact that his tax cuts for the wealthy have created the largest deficit in American history.
posted by chris at 2:46 PM
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