Bush Budget is "a multi-trillion dollar decade long scam"

Noriel Roubini, Associate Professor Economics, NYU, responds to Bush's budget figures:

Who are these accounting scam artists trying to deceive? Do they think everyone in America and around the world is a mathematically challenged total idiot or an accounting moron? 

The reality is, that based on realistic scenarios outlined last week by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the deficit by 2009 will be close to $600b (or 4.0% of GDP) rather than falling to $233b; and the deficit will reach over $1,100b (or 5.5% of GDP) by 2015. 

How do they create the false $233b deficit by 2009? 

1. They assume spending cuts that are, by any historical and political standard, impossible to achieve. 

2. They assume revenue growth that is altogether wishful thinking and false based on current trends. And they do not consider the long-run costs of making all the Bush tax cuts permanent. 

3. They do not count the ongoing costs of the continued defense and homeland security spending and of future military and homeland security build-ups. 

4. They phase-in a budget busting social security privatization (that will cost alone $4.5 trillion in the next 20 years) only starting in 2009. 

This is worse than dishonesty; it is the most squalid manipulation of budgets ever seen aimed at pretending to achieve a budget figure that is utterly unrealistic and false in every possible dimension.