"Ed Rasimus" wrote
"D. Strang" wrote:

The reason Bush won't be re-elected, is he has never vetoed a spending bill.

You state a fact but grossly over-simplify a conclusion. The Supreme
Court has over-turned the "line-item" veto making it necessary to take
bills in toto rather than excise specific pork items. The trend from
Congress is increasingly to load up popular bills with amendments
bringing home the bacon. Back-scratching between
representatives/senators to guarantee passage of the principal bill
means a load of budget-busters included.

The White House (I'm not even blaming the President, but the whole
Executive) seems to be saying; that, as long as we get our program
through, then we really don't care what it costs.

If we start with the essential truism that appropriations bills start
in the house, the conclusion might be that it isn't the President that
is creating budget problems.

I believe it starts with the budget from the Executive, and snow-balls
from that start.

He did the tax cut to give back the surplus, and then signed bills to spend
the money anyway. Enron was an amateur comparably.

The Enron statement is a throw-away. A non-sequitur and inflammatory.

Enron is synonymous with accounting schemes. Anything but the truth.
We now operate on 10, 20, and 30 year plans. In 30 years we will
balance the budget they say, but then can't even predict six months in
advance on any specific chart leader. To top it off, we don't really know
anything except what the debt is, because banks use computers.

The tax cut was not to "give back the surplus" but to stimulate the
economy. The basic difference between conservative and liberal
approaches to the economy is that conservatives tend to believe that
individuals can best spend their own money.

You are simplifying too much. When the Republicans won the Executive,
the Congress was spending the surplus in small ways. It was a great
temptation. First, they needed to get rid of the surplus, and the debate
about paying down the debt, lost out to giving everyone some money
back. But then the market crashed. Nobody even remembers what they
spent the $300 on, but it was probably imports at Wal-Mart.

I'm trying to get my representatives to sponsor a constitutional amendment
that says basically, that the budget (as per the CBO) will be balanced two
years out of seven.

How very popular! But, impractical. First, the CBO is a suspiciously
political instrument and motivated by other factors than pure
accounting. Second, deficit spending is a necessary practice for both
long term capital investment and to respond to unforeseen
contingencies. Third, the ability to build infrastructure and pay it
off in future year dollars will often mandate defiict spending. (We do
it regularly in our personal budgets when we buy homes or cars.)

The only other measure would be "Percent of GDP", which is even more
artistic. CBO is used in all Executive budget computations. Currently we are
paying about 300 Billion a year in interest (300 Billion is the same as 6 million
$50k a year jobs, or almost the same as what we budget for DOD. That's
a lot of F-22's we could have bought.

All of that makes sense until the debt number is written down. There's no
way that 7,000 Billion can be compared with buying a new home or car.

Time to pay off the debt, not spend more.