It’s budget time, and by now we should expect another exercise in mendacity from the administration. And that’s not just partisan cant; just compare this year’s budget projections
Source: Office of Budget Management
with the ones from fiscal year 2003…
Source: Office of Budget Management
Facts on the ground changed — as witness the drop in off-the-budget surplus in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid due to rising medical costs and declining payroll taxes– but consistently the administration sweeps as many unpleasant realities under the rug as it can when selling its budgets and tax plans. The result is a FY2003 projection that the 2006 on-budget balance would be $142B in the hole, where in fact it’s now slated at negative $534B.
Tom Oliphant has a must-read analysis of how this tendency is all over the proposed 2006 budget.
The first clue to the truth lies in a measure of the federal deficit this crowd adores obscuring but is forced by law to disclose. It’s found only in a large table buried in the budget documents and estimates the government’s operating red ink - the amount by which spending exceeds revenue from income taxes and other fees. Last year it was far above the deficit figure that that typically makes its way into headlines - $567 billion, compared with the “official” figure of $412 billion.
As Oliphant points out, the projected deficits do not adequate take into account three huge expenditures: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the extension of the income tax cuts (and phasing out of the Alternative Minimum Tax), and the costs of Bush’s social security plan. As he writes, “The real outrage is the deliberate avoidance of unavoidable costs that the country faces if steps Bush wants to take are taken. If these steps are taken into account, a bad enough national debt of slightly more than $3 trillion four years ago will easily clear $11 trillion in a decade.”
Ticking time bombs indeed.
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