In other news, Obama is to give $900 million in aid to Gaza. http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/24/america/24gaza.php Why are we throwing our money into that sh!tty place?
How dumb is that? We sell the weapons to Israel to destroy the Gaza strip. The reconstruction bill comes back to us.
How does the President expect to cut the deficit in half while spending $1 trillion on a bailout, however much it will cost to engage in military action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and spend $900 million in Gaza? I would love to see his calculator.
It's still a gigantic deficit, even if he manages it. $563 billion would have been a record a year or two ago. Maybe the deficit is just so immense that he can cut billions just because the money was pumped so quickly into the economy. The stimulus bill targets hundreds of billions to be spent in the first several months, right? Not all of them are recurring expenditures. The budget will go down for that reason alone. Am I missing something?
The bailout money is in the next few years - I assume the premise is that the bailout money will be $0 in 2013. And if the bailouts work, then economic growth will increase revenues. So while that would have a net negative effect on the debt, it would have a net positive effect on the deficit in 2013. $900 million in Gaza is pocket change for the government and again has no impact on the 2013 deficit.
So hes going to reduce the deficit to $600 billion and we are supposed to be happy about that. These stimulus things should be one-time payments, and by 2013 we should not have these in the budget meaning of course the deficit should be back to "normal" levels. And I say "normal" because W redefined what "normal" is and it was quite ridiculous under him. I hope Obama does stick to this however, as I really expected him and all other politicians in Washington to see todays deficit as new norms. There is one thing about politicians (democrat or republican), they love to spend our tax dollars, as well as dollars we don't have.
My curiousity involves how much off-budget stuff (like Iraq and Afghanistan) are being brought on-budget. If you're talking $200-$300B / yr, that makes $563B *with* that stuff much more impressive than without. But I have no idea how much was off-budget in the past that will change with the "Honest Obama" rules.
Yep, you're missing that these are politicians giving money to people who will come back for more. They say most are not going to be recurring, but somehow I dont trust them.
Yeah - I just don't know how much it accounts for. The 2008 deficit is all screwed up, but I wonder how much higher the 2007 deficit would have been if using the Obama accounting method. If it's $50B higher, then it won't make much difference. If it was $300B higher, that raises the bar significantly for what Obama needs to cut.
If the "off-budget" stuff is brought into the budget accounting, and an immense amount is non-recurring from the stimulus bill, what kind of budget are we really going to see? Pretty darn confusing, if you ask me.
Maybe he's naive to assume that it will pay dividends to the ME peace process. If it did work, that would allow cutbacks in the military budget. Pretty unlikely, imo.
What about Social Security? The securities held by the trust funds are spent and being spent. That is off books debt. It is estimated that the Trust Funds may be holding between 3-5 trillion in paper (treasury securities) that should be added on the books to the deficit. That is a Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama off book sleight of hand that people need to know- there is no gold in the Trust Funds, just more paper backed by the treasury.
Believing that tax cuts for working families, scientific research, funding for our horrendous data and energy infrastructure, and grants for kids going to college can be labeled "crap" was a central problem with the last 8 years of executive "leadership." Just my opinion.
