Ever the bulwark of fiscal responsibility that he is, President Bush has made it a goal of his second term to “cut the deficit in half” by the time he leaves office. But what exactly does Mr. Bush mean by “deficit,” and what does he mean by “half”?
You can never be too sure about the president’s rhetoric: he sounds like a plainspoken man, but you have to listen very carefully to what he says – there is always a deeper meaning. Either he is a man of great intelligence who knows how to communicate complex ideas in simple terms (a theory which would help explain his most recent victory over Senator what’s-his-name), or he is a simpleton who fails to grasp the complexity of what he says.
In any case, this whole “cut the deficit in half” idea is a case in point: by “deficit,” Bush means the one that was projected last year – not the one we actually have – and by “half,” he means “as a percentage of the economy.”
This tricky bit of reasoning allows Bush to sound like he is reducing the deficit even if it grows larger – if the economy grows faster than the deficit, for example, the percentage would decrease, but the deficit itself would still be growing larger in real terms. And by using the projected deficit from last year as a standard for cutting the budget in half, Bush is allowing himself more leeway in what he says.
As the Los Angeles Times reported last week, the projected deficit Bush is using is $521 billion, so his goal as stated is to reduce the deficit to $260.1 billion. But if he used the deficit we actually have – $412 billion
– the goal would have to be $54.5 billion less.
It becomes even more complicated if you consider what isn’t counted in the deficit – emergency spending like the $82 billion Bush recently requested for Iraq and Afghanistan, engagements with no end in sight. There is also entitlement spending on Medicare, originally forecast at $400 billion but now expected to reach into the trillions. Not to mention Social Security.
As the Opinion in Brief section on these pages has said before, we must keep our commitments in the war on terror, but we should also make sure programs like Medicare and Social Security that care for the most vulnerable members of our society aren’t short-changed either. If we are to keep our government running the way it is today, then the question comes down to how to
pay for it all.
The answer may be simpler than it sounds.
According to a fiscal projection in Tuesday’s Washington Post, surpluses would be possible by 2011 if we just didn’t do anything.
That’s right: do nothing. If we take Bush’s defense spending increases and other spending cuts at face value, they will balance the budget by 2011.
But then why is the president also arguing to make his temporary tax cuts permanent and privatize Social Security, when it will only further bankrupt the government? According to the Post’s fiscal projection, which was based on White House and Congressional estimates, the deficit would actually grow once Bush left office if we took this course of action.
But there’s the key: after he leaves office. It’s nothing new for second-term presidents to pass on their problems to their successors, but it’s odd that the president is trying to cause them. Maybe if a Democrat wins in 2008 he can blame it on them.