But to achieve such long term balance we cannot throw a party for ourselves now by cutting taxes massively. We have to pay down the debt and reform the financing of social security and medicare instead. The liberals in Congress who oppose this tax cut are screaming and crying how this reckless 'spending' will undermine our economy, increase the national debt, put poor folks out in the streets, and generally ruin the country. These are the same liberals who enthusiastically vote tens of billions for their favorite government programs without blinking an eye. Regrettably, there are members of both parties who seem willing to behave in a fiscally irresponsible fashion.
Projections are just that, and all projections are error prone.
Our capacity to project budget revenues and expenditures accurately is simply terrible. CBO acknowledges that a return of deficits within four years cannot be ruled out. President Bush has claimed that his budget preserves a one trillion dollar reserve, but it does not in fact do so. Robert Bixby, from a previous chat on the budget, said that Bush's tax cut is banking on a ten-year projection and that this is a bad idea. We got to ten years because in the old days we looked only one year ahead.