Heritage Foundation budget analyst Brian Riedl estimates the federal deficit, which was projected to be $331 billion this year before Katrina hit, will rise to $500 billion in 2008 and $873 billion in 2015, largely due to hurricane relief and reconstruction, together with spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Riedl cautions that "even these estimates could prove overly optimistic."
Without serious spending cuts, Bush's promise of no tax hikes is a fraud. Taxes will go up, since ultimately that's the only way to finance federal spending. It's just a question of when.
Either the burden will be imposed on current taxpayers (and the repercussions felt by current politicians), or it will be dumped on our children and grandchildren.
In this context, it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry when House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, announces that there's no fat left to cut in the federal budget because "we've pared it down pretty good." At the same time, DeLay made a promise to anyone who managed the impossible feat of finding expendable items in the $2.6 trillion federal budget: "Bring me the offsets. I'll be glad to do it."
Several groups took up the challenge. Off the tops of their heads, two analysts at the Cato Institute came up with enough cuts to cover the $62 billion already authorized for Katrina relief.
Taxpayers for Common Sense somehow found $144 billion in fat that DeLay missed. Heritage concluded that "a renewed war on wasteful spending could easily save $100 billion or more a year."
The RSC proposed cuts that would save $370 billion over five years.
DeLay is no more serious about fiscal responsibility than Shelley Moore Capito. Like her, he cites the jobs created by federal spending as reason enough to support it (especially in his district) -- a rationale that would justify paying people to dig holes and fill them in again. At least such a project would be preferable to digging holes deeper and deeper, which is the work of Congress.