It has to be. Dig this.
April 25 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama said he is committed to imposing fiscal discipline on the government and called on Congress to pass a law requiring any new spending be matched by higher taxes or cuts elsewhere.Now take a look at this.
Obama, in his weekly radio and Internet address, said that while his initiatives to confront the economic crisis have deepened the country’s debt, his administration will “demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.”
“All across America, families are tightening their belts and making hard choices,” Obama said. “Now, Washington must show that same sense of responsibility.”
Huh?
KT,
ReplyDeleteso why does it reach a minimum in 2012 and then grow again. What sort of one time thing are they doing that goes away?
As I understand it, the decline has to do with economic growth assumptions and the regrowth has to do with the mammoth new social spending that is being added to the budgetary baseline. Once added to the baseline, it continues to grow. I think it's also reflecting the phase-in of the new health insurance costs.
ReplyDeleteI could be wrong on all of this.
I do think the assumptions are hopelessly optimistic. We're already worse than their worst-case scenario for 2009.
I'll leave you with two more thoughts. The deficit will be worse also because most of Obama's revenue schemes will be gutted. He planned to pay for much of this with cap-and-trade which the midwesterners will make sure gets killed.
ReplyDeleteFinally, I would suggest that these are the death throes of big government. As I have blogged in the past, the Fed will have to print money to cover all of this. The math doesn't work out any other way. As the politicians discover that they're spending printed money and their particular addition to the budget doesn't make much a difference in the grand scheme of things, they will add more and more and more.
The Fed is hooking the Democrats in congress on crack cocaine. Printed money.
They'd better enjoy it while they can. The Chinese are edging out the door and from what I've read the dollar's days as the global reserve currency are numbered. My bet would be a year more or two at best. After that, we'll all pay dearly for this profligacy.
Note that the bar graph does not include looming deficits due to Social Security, which (in an accounting fraud that would embarrass Jack Zuta), is "off-budget".
ReplyDeletewinquisi: (VEEN-qwee-si; n, Oxchutalan) the aperture for the mouth on a South American blowgun