Worried About Deficit, Some Long for Perot

[Dreamer128]

By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the 1992 presidential election campaign, Texas billionaire Ross Perot told voters their children would lose the American dream because of the country's mounting budget deficit and ballooning foreign debt.

In this year's election, with some analysts saying the U.S. finances are even worse than twelve years ago, there is no Ross Perot to hammer home the message.

"In 1992, Perot forced the Democrats and Republicans to deal with the deficit seriously. This year, we're hearing lip service from both parties," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington interest group.

President Bush this week presented a $2.4 trillion budget for fiscal year 2005, with a projected $364 billion deficit which he said he would halve by 2009.

"I'm confident our budget addresses a very serious situation," Bush said at a Cabinet meeting. "And that is that we are at war and we had dealt with a recession. And our budget is able to address those significant factors in a way that reduces the deficit in half."

But Bush's figure excluded military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, likely to total $50 billion. By projecting its budget for only five years, the White House also failed to address a fiscal crunch that will hit in earnest once baby boomers start to retire in large numbers a few years later.

David Walker, head of the independent General Accounting Office, said the country faced a unprecedented budget crunch 10 years from now.

"We face a demographic tidal wave that will never recede. I don't believe people really understand that yet and it's going to take a concerted effort by a number of parties over a number of years to educate the public," he told Reuters.

DOWNPLAYING THE DANGER

Presenting the budget, Office of Management and Budget Director Josh Bolten said the deficit was manageable at only 4.5 percent of the gross domestic product, a figure that was in no way unusual in historical terms.

"Deficits have been this large or larger in six of the last twenty-five years, including a peak of six percent in 1983," he said.

But the bipartisan Concord Coalition, which campaigns for fiscal responsibility, said that Bush's budget ignored the full magnitude of the crisis.
"Even if the policies in this budget succeed in halving the deficit by 2009, deficits will shoot up again after that due to rising entitlement costs and the permanent extension of expiring tax cuts," said Robert Bixby, the group's director.

"This fiscally irresponsible combination produces an exploding cigar effect timed to go off just when the baby boomers begin to receive Social Security and Medicare at the end of the decade," he said.

Bixby said Bush's tax cuts enacted last year while the country was spending more on security and the Iraq war, combined with the new Medicare drug benefit for elderly Americans, made 2003 "one of the most, if not the most, fiscally irresponsible years in U.S. history."

The administration seems unconcerned about the criticism. A recent book about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill quoted former Vice President Dick Cheney as saying, "deficits don't matter, we saw that under President Reagan."

The leading Democratic presidential candidates are on record as pledging to repeal at least part of Bush's tax cuts. But none has made it a centerpiece of their platforms, as Perot did in 1992.

The issue may be starting to rise in the public consciousness anyway. A Pew Research Center poll last month showed slightly over 50 percent of Americans believe that reducing the deficit should be a top concern, a rise of 10 percent in the past year.

"This is an issue that is growing as a public concern. People are worried that if we're losing revenue and spending so much on homeland security and Iraq, where's the money going to come from?" said Dean Spiliotes at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

Still, there hasn't yet been a defining moment, similar to when Perot told Americans in a 1992 presidential debate, "Our children will not see the American dream because of this debt that somebody somewhere dropped on us."

As Washington Democratic Rep. Norm Dicks said this week, "Where's Ross Perot when you need him?"

[source: Reuters]

[Timber Loftis]

Well, Perot may spark some good debate, but I don't think I'd vote for the man behind ValueJet.

[Yorick]

That's rooted. How can the worlds premier economy be in such bad shape.

[Dreamer128]

Yeah. Hopefully, things will improve. The economies of most of the western world lean heavily on the US.

[Ronn_Bman]

I did not vote for Perot once....


I voted for him twice! [img]tongue.gif[/img] [img]smile.gif[/img]