FALLING UPWARDS:

Big Promises Bump Into Budget Realities: New President Won't Have an Easy Time Paying for New Initiatives, Fiscal Experts Say (Lori Montgomery, 6/22/08, Washington Post)

In a new paper titled "Facing the Music: The Fiscal Outlook at the End of the Bush Administration," University of California at Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach and two co-authors from the Brookings Institution conclude that, if spending grows at historic rates, simply keeping the Bush tax cuts and halting the spread of the AMT would drive the budget deficit to $481 billion by the end of the next president's first term, or 2.7 percent of the economy.

Nevermind the inability to forecast economics accurately or the massive cuts that will follow winding down the WoT, the deficit has averaged an "unsustainable" 2.2% of GDP over the past forty years, 25 of which have been the greatest economic boom in human history. Deficits are a moral issue, not an economic one.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2008 9:41 AM