Notatka prasowa z poniedziałku 02. lutego 2004, 19:09 (CET) :
Notatka prasowa (po angielsku niestety) Published: January 3 2007 19:08 :
Prominent Democratic economists on Wednesday challenged President George W. Bush’s pledge to present a budget next month that would cut the federal government deficit to zero by 2012 while making tax cuts permanent. Jason Furman, director of the centrist Hamilton Project, said: “There will be a lot left out and I would bet it relies on deep, unspecified and improbable cuts in future discretionary spending.” He challenged Mr Bush to state specifically which programmes would bear the cost of spending cuts in all the years to 2012. Jim Horney, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the White House budget would not deal with the need to pay for a fix to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which is catching a growing number of middle-class families. And he warned that it would not make adequate allowance for uncertain future costs in fighting the “war on terror”.
The sceptical response follows the president’s commitment in an article in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday to set out a plan to “balance the federal budget by 2012 while funding our priorities and making the tax cuts permanent”. A White House spokesman told the FT on Wednesday “it is an achievable goal” and pointed out that the Bush administration had achieved its previous promise of halving the deficit by 2008 a year early. The year 2012 is an obvious medium-term target for balancing the budget, because it already shows the narrowest deficit on current forecasts: $54bn according to projections by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. However, the CBO estimates that the deficit in 2012 would be $284bn higher if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, even before allowing for any higher debt interest payments.
Czyli historia ta sama co roku – prezydent oswiadcza ze bedzie zmniejszal deficyt budzetowy bez wzrostu podatkow. Kto na swiecie jeszcze kupuje te bajeczki ?
