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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Bush budget trickery |
Current rating: 0 |
by Brendan Nyhan
(No verified email address) |
05 Feb 2002
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The budget is clearly a political document - this year's even comes with a flag on the cover. But that's no excuse for blatantly misleading the public. |
President Bush unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2003
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/
yesterday. Regrettably, the document contains a number of deceptive claims, including attempts to obscure the effect of the Bush tax cut and an unreasonable assumption that a tax provision will be allowed to raise taxes for millions of Americans.
Efforts to avoid issues that could be politically damaging to the administration are especially frequent in the section called "Budget Implications of the War" (a title that sets the tone for spin to come).
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2003/bud08.html
For example, in discussing the effect of the tax cut on projected ten year surpluses, the administration makes this tricky claim:
"In the 1997 Budget, rising deficits were forecast totaling $1.4 trillion over a 10 year horizon. By the 2002 Budget steadily rising surpluses were projected over a 10 year period, totaling $5.6 trillion. Due to the events of last year, the latest projections are in between these wildly divergent estimates."
In fact, the new Congressional Budget Office ten year surplus projection
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=3277&sequence=0&from=7
is $1.6 trillion, which the administration obscures as "in between" estimates of $1.4 trillion and $5.6 trillion rather than stating the exact figure. Moreover, "events of last year" suggests that the terrorist attacks are responsible for this deterioration, while obscuring the fact that the CBO estimates that 41% of the total surplus reduction is attributable to the tax cut. Notice how carefully this statement is constructed - the tax cut was an "event" that did take place last year, so the statement is technically true.
The administration also claims in the same section that "the budget should be back in surplus by 2004 or 2005," but this too is deceptive. A provision protecting millions of middle income taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax (AMT) expires at the end of 2004, as Glenn Kessler
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23496-2002Feb4.html
points out in the Washington Post. Virtually everyone acknowledges that this will have to be corrected, but including the $200+ billion cost of this provision would eliminate the projected surplus of $61 billion in 2005.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2003/bud34.html
As a result, the budget does not include AMT relief. (In fact, as Robert Greenstein of liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out,
http://www.cbpp.org/2-4-02bud.htm
the assumption that AMT relief will be allowed to expire is just one of many accounting devices used in the budget to obscure the costs of tax cuts.)
The budget is clearly a political document - this year's even comes with a flag on the cover. But that's no excuse for blatantly misleading the public.
Copyright (c) 2001-2002 by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan. Its contents may be redistributed under the terms of the Open Publication License, http://www.spinsanity.org/license.html |
See also:
http://www.spinsanity.org/
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