It's Just Not Working
The new ten-year Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment of the President's budget provides as good a perspective as any for evaluating the overall economic and fiscal policies of the Bush Administration.
If the President got everything he wanted in this year's budget, says CBO, the federal budget deficit would swell to $338 billion for the next fiscal year (2004). That would be a new record, though the current-year deficit may already exceed the previous all-time high deficit of $290 billion, achieved during the last fiscal year of the previous Bush Administration.
But the real kicker is in the long-range CBO numbers: if the President's budget were implemented, the federal government would pile up $1.82 trillion in deficits -- adding that amount to the national debt -- by 2013. And that estimate does not include costs associated with the war in Iraq, the post-war reconstruction of Iraq, new homeland security costs, or the most expensive domestic priority of both parties, a Medicare prescription drug benefit. And it does not, of course, include anything at all to deal with the Big Daddy of future domestic costs: the retirement of the baby boom generation.
Progressive Policy Institute Senior Economist Jeff Lemieux thinks the real ten-year number, even if estimated conservatively, is a little over $3 trillion in deficit spending.
But even you compare the lower CBO deficit number to what it was projecting just two years ago ($5.6 trillion in surpluses over ten years), the Bush Administration has presided over a seven-and-a-half trillion dollar deterioration in the fiscal condition of the federal government, and is working hard to dig the hole even deeper.
Add in the 1.9 million lost jobs since March 2001, the lowest consumer confidence levels since October 1993, the lowest stock market levels since 1997, and a global economic outlook that remains poised on the edge of disaster, and you'd have to say the Administration's fiscal and economic policies haven't exactly worked out very well so far.
Defenders of the Administration will immediately produce a variety of excuses for this record, some good (the costs and uncertainties connected with the war on terrorism), some bad (it's all the Clinton Administration's fault), and some impossible to confirm (prosperity is just around the corner). But this is an Administration that claims it judges domestic programs strictly by tangible performance measures. It's led by a President who ran for office by claiming to be "a reformer with results," who would usher in "an era of responsibility."
Since the President is more than capable of executing U-turns in policy without ever admitting error, it might just be time for them to consider a 180 degree change in their economic fiscal policies, before the wheels come off and we're all in more trouble than we can overcome.
It's time to admit: It's just not working.