White House to project record deficits
Apparently, the White House is set to project record deficits:
The White House was expected on Tuesday to forecast a record budget deficit approaching a half trillion dollars this fiscal year — $150 billion worse than its earlier projections — with little hope of a turnaround any time soon.
This is just plain awful fiscal management. Not only is it incredible that a tax cut was issued with a projected $300 billion deficit, but now we see “oops! our forecast was off by 50%”. Sure, there’s new money being spent on Iraq and such ($58 billion between Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the article), but there’s still another $100 billion that was unprojected.
In the private sector, a CEO (or at least the CFO) would be fired for something like that.
Congress authorizes the spending of money. Maybe we should tell them to cut something. And just cutting out the tax cut won’t solve the problem because (as you’ve stated) there is a $300B defecit. Right? So what gets cut?
You are, of course, correct… the “CFO”, in the case of our budget, is Congress since they deal out the appropriations. Particularly when Congress is controlled by the same party as the White House, Congress will tend to go along with the President’s big agenda items, like the tax cut or the war appropriations. So, really, both of those branches are responsible when there are big discrepancies.
Sure, the national budget is complex and no one wants their pet causes cut. But, we can’t go along spending money that we don’t have forever.
Clinton had it easy, because the economy was great, and there was plenty of tax being paid to cover everyone’s favorite programs. But, perhaps that was the time to make some cuts and slice into the debt. Cutting programs now to balance the budget would surely result in more jobs lost, etc… but adding $450 billion to the debt seems painful unless we’re actually going to pay that back when the economy picks up.