There are two popular songs I know of with the word "make-believe" in the title. There's Make Believe from Show Boat ("Can we find peace of mind in pretending?"). And there's an old Conway Twitty hit, It's Only Make-Believe. (That was when Twitty was in his rockabilly phase. I had a copy of the 45. The children are asking, "What's a 45?")
Now we have a column by Robert Samuelson entitled "Both Parties Fall Prey to Make-Believe Politics." At last, some good common sense! The Republicans want tax cuts. In the face of an estimated $12 trillion in deficits in the next ten years, the Republicans want tax cuts! And the Democrats would like to spend more on this and that. In the face of $12 trillion in deficits, the Democrats want to increase spending!
No one wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, business subsidies, military spending, transportation spending, or any of the other places where the big money gets spent. And no one, not even the Democrats, really wants to raise taxes. Even Mr. Obama wants to retain the Bush tax cuts for people making only $250,000 a year or less.
You know, I think the IRS, OMB, and CBO publish charts on where the money comes from and where it goes. I'm going to find one of those charts and bring it to this blog.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
Sunday, March 7, 2010
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Analytical_Perspectives/
The link I have attached here takes one to a section of the budget which provides a lot of the background detail and assumptions on which the government has based its projections of deficits and surpluses. There is discussion of the fiscal gap, which is the amount of money needed to balance the budget, exclusive of interest charges.
Well, the national debt is so large, that even with today's low interest rates, interest charges are one of the largest single items in the Federal budget.
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