Bruce Bartlett takes President George W. Bush's accounting methods to task in this article at townhall.com.
Bartlett does an excellent job of laying out the problem with the president's recent announcement that the deficit was about half of what recent Office of Management and Budget projections had been.
If this is the standard for success, one wonders why we didn't do even better. All Bush had to do was order OMB to make an even bigger mistake than it did in estimating what the deficit would be. If it had wrongly projected the deficit to be $500 billion or $600 billion in 2006, then Bush could have announced an even bigger improvement. Maybe next year he should tell OMB to project a deficit of $1 trillion. Then even if the budget deficit rises, Bush can congratulate himself once again for beating expectations.
President Bush, right, accompanied by first lady Laura Bush, gestures as he addresses the media about his visit with troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, Friday, Dec. 22, 2006 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) In the real world, of course, people measure their progress not against some incorrect forecast, but against actual results. By this standard, the numbers don't look as good. Bush inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion in fiscal year 2001, which the government was already in the midst of when he took office. By the following year, FY 2002, the surplus was gone and the government had a deficit of $158 billion, which rose to $378 billion in 2003 and $413 billion in 2004, before falling to $318 billion in 2005 and $248 billion last year.
Bartlett goes on to point out that none of these budget projections include Medicare and Social Security, the two biggest budget busters in our government. Without including those, all other budget projections are completely inaccurate and useless.
There's good reason why neither of these programs are included in budget projects. They cannot be curbed nor dropped and will be funded regardless of the cost to the rest of the budget. They will be, that is, until there are so many people in those systems versus people paying into those systems that it is no longer sustainable. But no one wants to discuss that, as was evidenced when President Bush wanted to reform Social Security back in 2004. I wouldn't say it will be "fun" to see Democrats suddenly rediscover the problems of Social Security and Medicare, but it will be interesting, to be sure.
|