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THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
< http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1316866&l=16603 >
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BUSH MISLEADS PUBLIC ABOUT CAUSE OF DEFICIT
On the same day the White House unveiled its 2005 budget, President Bush
calculatingly obscured the reason the nation now faces a record $500 billion
deficit. He said, "The reason we are where we are, in terms of the deficit,
is because we went through a recession, we were attacked, and we're fighting
a war."
But according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the single
biggest cause of the deficit is the president's massive tax cuts for the
wealthy -- which he conveniently did not mention. Specifically, 36% of the
deficit comes from the tax cuts, while only 31% comes from
defense/war-related spending increases, and the rest comes from the economic
slowdown. In fact the president actually acknowledged in last year's budget
that the deficit is primarily his fault. Table S-3 of Bush's 2004 budget
"shows unambiguously that the administration's fiscal 2004 budget proposes a
massive annual increase in the deficit" and that without those proposals the
nation would return to surplus. In other words, the president is falsely
invoking national security, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the war in
Iraq to hide the fact that his tax cuts for the wealthy have created the
largest deficit in American history.
With 88% of Americans now believing that the deficit is a "very serious" or
"somewhat serious problem," the president has also tried to blame government
spending for the deficit. But again, as the CBO notes, spending is at "a
lower level than in any year from 1975 through 1996." And as the president
starves veterans health care, low-income housing, and health care programs
of funding, he is pushing more than $1 trillion in new tax cuts, primarily
for the wealthy.
Visit Misleader.org for more about Bush Administration distortion. -->
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