In what David Broder calls a "Trillion-Dollar Gimmick" in his latest editorial in the Washington Post, he lays out the treatment of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 which are slated to expire in 2010.
Bush in his recently submitted 2007 budget is treating those tax cuts as if they don't expire. The net result of this is to ensure that the cost of continuing the tax cuts in the years after the expiration date would never be counted. And, since those years were not counted when the tax cuts were first enacted, this accounting gimmick would actually cost an unbudgeted $1.6 trillion over the next decade according to the Congressional Budget Office.
This same budget proposes costly personal accounts for Social Security yet curbs spending for Medicare and Medicade benefits. Bush is remaking our country into his and his big business cronies image. To do it he is drowning us in red ink!
The complete Broder article can be found at this Washington Post site:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021701848_pf.html
2 comments:
George Bush's $1.6 trillion budget bookkeeping trick does not come as a surprise. His well known competitive drive couldn't allow him to be outdone in dishonesty by Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Bernard Ebbers and other white collar criminals. Their bookkeeping scams were only in the billions of dollars range.
My big problem with the proposed budget is the failure to include the off-budget items such as the continuing $$$ cost of our presence in Iraq. Human lives seem to be without value there, but most informed voters would react to the trillions NOT included. jmt
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