Yes, There ARE Real Journalists at the NYT

This story about the fiscal consequences of Bush's tax and spend policies ought to give anyone devoted to balanced budgets and small government serious hearburn.

If President Bush is re-elected, he and the Republicans face a big agenda, including an unfinished war in Iraq, and virtually all of his tax cuts will be financed with borrowed money. Unless the government defaults on its debt, that money will eventually have to be repaid.

Faster economic growth will not do the trick. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office already assumes that the economy will grow at a solid pace in the years ahead and that tax revenues will climb even if President Bush's tax cuts are made permanent.

But if military spending in Iraq continues, even at lower levels, and President Bush prevents the alternative minimum tax from raising taxes on some 30 million families, the budget office estimated that federal deficits from now through 2014 would total $3.5 trillion.

Federal interest payments alone - the "debt tax," as Democrats are fond of saying - would climb to $402 billion in 2014 and amount to 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product. Measured against the size of the economy, those deficits and interest burdens would be smaller that those of the 1980's and early 1990's. But they would be occurring just when Social Security and Medicare entitlements are expected to soar as a result of baby boomers' retirement.

Stuart Butler, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, contends that political leaders will have no choice but to raise taxes if they do not cut back on trillions of dollars in unfunded commitments - most of them associated with Medicare, which President Bush and Congress expanded greatly with last year's prescription drug program.

[...]

Administration officials remind audiences constantly that the federal deficits are largely a result of economic shocks: the collapse of the stock market bubble, which wiped out trillions in stock market value; the recession of 2001; and the plunge in business investment that lasted until this year.

But those problems have almost nothing to do with the budget challenges ahead. The Congressional Budget Office estimated this month that cyclical economic problems contributed only $47 billion of this year's anticipated deficit of $422 billion. Next year, cyclical economic problems are expected to have almost no impact on the budget, but the deficit is expected to be $348 billion.

Going forward, virtually the entire federal deficit will be a result of structural causes - tax and spending policies set down by the president and Congress.

President Bush has called for freezing the level of nondefense discretionary spending over the next few years, which would result in real cuts for many programs, like housing assistance, after adjusting for inflation. But those cuts affect less than one-fifth of the federal budget and would barely nick future deficits. The rest of the budget - Social Security, Medicare, military spending, domestic security and interest on the debt - would continue to grow smartly.

This story can't be dismissed as a liberal smear-job by anyone who still has a smidgeon of intellectual honesty left. Bush is spending the United States into a train-wreck, and there's no real pressure on him from the right to alter course. If the thinking amongst conservatives is that he'll do a 180% turnaround in his second term, I have to ask why they think this should be the case, seeing as he'll have no electoral pressures on him to hold his feet to the fire, and there's nothing in his resume to date to indicate that he's anything but a friend of big government.

It seems crystal clear to me that there's only one thing that can put a brake on the borrow-and-spend tendency that's gripped the US over the last 4 years: divided government.