Sunday, January 02, 2005

IF YOU DON'T COUNT THE COST OF THE HUMMER, THE BOAT, THE 42-INCH FLAT-PANEL TV, AND THE TRIP TO BERMUDA, AND IF YOU ASSUME THAT I'LL WIN THE LOTTERY BEFORE I HAVE TO PAY BILLS AT THE END OF THE MONTH, I OWE $0 ON MY CREDIT CARDS

That, in essence, is Bush's budget policy:

...White House officials are making several budgeting decisions that make their tax revenues look higher and their spending look lower than many analysts think is realistic.

The first is to exclude a wide range of future costs for proposals, like those for military operations in Iraq, that White House officials say are impossible to predict....

Administration officials are omitting a second big group of costs for goals Mr. Bush has identified but not formally proposed.

By far the biggest of these is his plan to privatize Social Security in part and let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private accounts.

Republican and Democratic analysts alike say the proposal would require the government to incur "transition costs" of $2 trillion or more over the next decade or two....

Another major cost that will be excluded from Mr. Bush's budget stems from the alternative minimum tax...

... repealing the tax would reduce projected tax revenues by $87 billion in 2009 alone and more than $500 billion by the end of 2014.

Almost none of that expense is expected to be in Mr. Bush's coming budget....

Administration officials are expected to project a record surge of at least $200 billion [in tax revenue] for 2005. That would be an increase of more than 10 percent, twice as big as the jump in 2004, and it would be followed by additional big jumps for the next five years....


This is insane. We are now the United States of Enron.

(And there's more on the madnesws of Bush economics here.)

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