The Budget

Robert P. Watson

I believe that our main economic problems are Bush administration's legacy of a national debt of $11 trillion and record budget and trade deficits as far as the eye can see. I believe our debt and deficits pose greater long-term threats to our economy than the reconstruction of Iraq. The budget deficit is all the more upsetting when one considers that President Bush and the Republican leaders in Congress inherited four straight annual budget surpluses.

What they did with those surpluses is almost unimaginable: They took us from a record surplus to a record deficit in just over a year, then left office in 2009 with a whopping $1.2 trillion annual deficit! No business would retain a CEO with such a track record. We should be outraged that they have stuck the next generation of Americans - our children and grandchildren - with what is essentially a birth tax. I suspect the only reason people have not marched to Boston Harbor and dumped tea over this irresponsible behavior is because the sheer magnitude of our debt is so large as to be incomprehensible. It is, admittedly, hard to get one's brain around a billion of anything, yet alone trillions and trillions of something. Let me help you get a sense of the enormity of our problem. Here is another way to think of the $11 trillion debt the previous administration gave us: 11 trillion dollar bills, if stacked one on top of the other, would not only stretch the distance from the Earth to the moon, but would extend four times that distance! That is a huge national debt and a huge threat to our economy.

Or, think of it this way - the national debt is so large that the interest owed on the debt per day is roughly $1 trillion! That is a trillion dollars per day, which I am sure you would agree could have been put to better use than paying for our leaders' recklessness. President Bush and too many politicians have made their priorities well known over the past few years by spending like drunken college students on spring break. My priority is as follows: A single day's interest on our debt could fund a state's Head Start program, pay for a healthy, nutritious school lunch for every needy child in the nation, form the basis of a national commitment to eradicating diseases through a federal stem cell research program, and put armor on every Humvee in the U.S. military. These are the ways I would have spent the $1 trillion. It is a matter of priorities and our leaders have the wrong priorities.

To me the budget deficit is a values question. If certain politicians want to talk about values and morals, I say that they should answer this values question: How can they claim to be concerned about values when our children and grandchildren will inherit their mountainous debt and deficits?

The debt is, in my opinion, a baby tax. Taxing toddlers and teenagers because of the reckless spending policies of President Bush and both parties in Congress is not leadership in my book. Nor would it have been to our Founding Fathers! They saw the debt they encountered in winning the Revolutionary War as a matter of intergenerational sovereignty. How could they forge a nation conceived in the principle of liberty and opportunity yet strap the next generation of Americans with debt? To do so was immoral and antithetical to the promise of the great American experiment. So they set before themselves the task of eliminating the debt, which was accomplished during Thomas Jefferson's second term as president.

The 200^th anniversary of that accomplishment occured in 2006. Let us honor this achievement by dedicating ourselves to electing leaders who understand and share the Founders' values.

Now fast forward 200 years to a far less distinguished group of leaders.

Not only have politicians run up staggering debts and deficits, but they had no plan for remedying the problem and no intention of telling the American people the truth. Then, after years of fiscal insanity, President Bush claimed that he was suddenly serious about the deficit and intended to cut the amount in half in five years. But a study released in early March 2005 by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that Bush's deficit reduction plan did not cut the deficit at all. In fact, the CBO study and numerous other credible assessments by such groups as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that these plans resulted in deficits totaling roughly $3 trillion dollars through 2015. Ironically, this figure is approximately $2 trillion worse than the estimate had Bush simply done nothing in response to his deficits.

Moreover, President Bush refused to provide Congress and the media with complete and accurate information on budget spending on domestic programs. Once the budget was released studies discovered camouflaged cuts in domestic programs. Also, Bush became the first president in memory not to include projected budget figures in his budget. Many leaders did not utter a word of concern because they support the President's hide-and-seek budgeting. We deserve full and fair disclosure from government, which was mandated by one of the Executive Orders President Obama signed in his first full day on the job.

The status quo is not the type of thinking and leadership we need on the debt and deficit. I do not believe we need to burden average citizens or small businesses with increased taxes to balance the budget. Nor do I feel we should do it on the backs of those in need by gutting domestic programs, as President Bush and the previous Congress proposed. However, we need to roll back Bush's tax give-aways to the wealthiest Americans and eliminate loopholes for corporations. President Obama's economic recovery package calls for increases in spending - on essential and neglected initiatives such as public infrastructure, a nation-wide energy grid, and bio-technologies. Once the necessary injection to jump-start the economy and promote research and development is effective, every effort will need to be made to return to fiscal discipline and balanced budgets.