Garbanzo Toons

Good News?

The White House is predicting a lower than expected deficit this year. That's good right? I'm not so sure.

The federal budget picture will look slightly better next week. Relatively speaking.

The White House plans to announce the federal deficit will still be a record breaker, at $1.58 trillion, for the current 2009 fiscal year. But the amount is about $262 billion less than officials predicted earlier this year.

That's mostly because the administration erased a $250 billion contingency fund it had penciled into the budget in case Wall Street needed more government help in getting out of the financial crisis.

While the numbers still represent a tremendous amount of red ink, they would give the administration the opportunity to say its policies have prevented a more extreme financial crisis and eliminated the need for further bank infusions.

That's quite a spin, but this administration needs all the spin it can get. However,

Even at $1.58 trillion, the deficit this year would be three times larger than last year. A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the report before its release Tuesday, said the report for the budget year that ends Sept. 30 also will predict Washington will spend $3.653 trillion this year. Revenue, however, would reach only $2.074 trillion.

So according to my calculations, based on the previously quoted numbers 56.7% of government spending will be from tax revenue. The other 43.3% will be borrowed. That's pretty close to half. That's insane. And we're supposed to add to that by making health care a right for all Americans? That's even more insane. But there's more.

The nation's debt now stands at $11.7 trillion. In the scheme of things, that's more important than talking about the "deficit," which only looks at a one-year slice of bookkeeping and ignores previous debt that is still outstanding.

How high can the debt go before it becomes unsustainable? I'm just asking, because I don't know. Maybe I'm not seeing things correctly, but a steadily and faster climbing debt load is always bad news.

In a final note, it's all Bush's fault.

Stan Collender, a former congressional budget official, said the White House's new deficit numbers can't be blamed on Obama. Collender, now with Qorvis Communications, a Washington consulting firm, said that when President George W. Bush left office the deficit estimate for this fiscal year was $1.2 trillion, and that didn't include a tax adjustment and additional spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, approved this year, that Bush also would have sought.

As long as Obama is in office, everything that can't be pinned on the Jews, will be Bush's fault.

Labels: deficit, economy, Obama

posted by Harry @ 6:52 AM