From your friends at the OMB:

These charts are found in the Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2004 document (3.2 MB pdf), available on the Fiscal Year 2004 web page:




For more on the budget, we highly recommend the MaxSpeak Weblog which does a great job on the topic (e.g. this post). It's also where we found a link to a statement soliciting opposition to the Bush Administration's tax cut proposals -- from 10 Nobel Laureate economists. We will probably hear more about it, but for the time being, this is what they say:

We believe that the tax plan proposed by the Bush Administration would be a serious mistake for the country.

And while we're at it, here is a quote from an interview on PBS' News Hour:

Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

I find this budget nothing short of astonishing. We've had the greatest reversal of fortunes in recent history over the last two years going from big surpluses to deficits as far as the eye can see. And what's really troubling ... is that we're only five years from when the baby boomers start retiring.

We know, every long-term forecast tells us, when they retire in large numbers, daunting deficits, way beyond anything we've seen for half a century come back and threaten the economy. What's the president's response? To make the problem much worse.

It isn't just that there are these big expensive new tax cuts here. The design of the tax cuts is such that their cost is much greater after the period your budget figures cover, than it would be now. There's a huge new tax cut the White House announced just last Friday, none of us had known about before, that is designed through budget gimmicks, so it has almost no cost in the first ten years, and then massive costs out when the baby boomers retire.

So I view this budget, I've been here following budgets for 31 years, this is the most reckless, the least responsible budget I've ever seen a president of either party propose. Digging a hole much deeper for the nation, future generations, and the economy, in the very period not that far away when the nation ages and the boomers retire when we know we face the biggest challenges we've seen in a long time.

posted by Quiddity at 2/04/2003 01:23:00 AM