US Half-Trillion In The Red - Then It Gets Worse

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.rense.com/general40/UShal...oninthered.htm

US Half-Trillion In The Red -
Then It Gets Worse
The Palm Beach Post
8-30-3

Ugly as the record $480 billion deficit for next year looks, the truth is uglier. The estimate doesn't include the $1 billion-a-week acknowledged cost of occupying Iraq or the expected billions to build power and water systems, and the government must borrow $644 billion, not $480 billion, to get through the year. The difference is what it will take from Social Security.

As late as 1983, total federal spending wasn't as much as the amount Mr. Bush must borrow in the year that starts Oct. 1. Over 10 years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that $1.4 trillion will be added to the national debt -- $3.8 trillion if the borrowing from Social Security is counted. After 10 years, Congress will face a national debt nearly equal to today's $11 trillion gross domestic product, and the Baby Boomers will expect their Medicare and Social Security.

Wearing his "What, me worry?" face, the first Republican apologist to react was House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa. "We've got to hold the line on spending," he said. NASA needs money, according to those who investigated the shuttle explosion. Airport baggage inspectors are being cut, and there isn't money to inspect more than 2 percent of cargo containers coming into the country. That's part of the line Rep. Nussle wants to hold.

For dotty optimism, though, see The Wall Street Journal editorial page. That's where the chatterers of the right go for their talking points. It says Mr. Bush's tax cuts pay off with phenomenal growth. Actual growth in the last quarter was 3.1 percent. The CBO estimates 5.4 percent annual growth for the next five years -- which would be phenomenal -- and still shows deficits through 2011. Not even a rosy scenario can make Mr. Bush's budgets look balanced.

OK, so the new CBO numbers may turn out no more accurate over time than the $5.6 trillion surplus Mr. Bush blew through. But it's easier to imagine events that would make the new numbers worse -- war in Korea or Iran, worldwide financial crisis, tax cuts not ending on schedule -- than events that would improve them -- invention of a new product with as much economic impact as computers and the Internet had when they came along.

As the CBO foresees 2008, the year Mr. Bush expects to be his last in office, Congress will have $449 billon for non-defense spending while it has to pay $510 billion in interest on the debt it's still running up. The past will get more than the present. That's a prospect the party in power created. Why go there?

Copyright ? 2003, The Palm Beach Post. All rights reserved.

[HARDCORE]

The following paragraph from one of your pieces says it all I think!
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Ugly as the record $480 billion deficit for next year looks, the truth is uglier. The estimate doesn't include the $1 billion-a-week acknowledged cost of occupying Iraq or the expected billions to build power and water systems, and the government must borrow $644 billion, not $480 billion, to get through the year. The difference is what it will take from Social Security.
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With many deserving veterans still being denied benefits and medical care by their peers in the bureaucracies, all we need now is for the government to attack (again), Social Security too!

What will that leave for America's - honorable men and women? Will they too be reduced to welfare, or holding up signs on street corners!? Hell, welfare too has been decimated as a social safety net, leaving but a single choice!

"Are there no work houses, poor laws, or prisons to house the destitute?"

Hey, I'll bet that a scant few in International Power, would even opt to refurbish the likes of Dachau and Buchenwald, if given half a chance!

VERITAS