And the pre-planned farce plays out: Congress voted to extend the Bush tax cuts — how could they not? They were engineered to require reauthorization in an election year. And who wants to vote against a tax cut in an election year?
But here’s what the grand Bush plan has left for future generations (among his other grand legacies such as more terrorism and death of soldiers):
the CBO — Congress’s official budget scorekeeper — released new deficit projections that assumed Washington would stick to Bush’s tight controls on spending, fix the AMT, enact all of the president’s proposed tax cuts, and slowly draw down the military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under that scenario, this year’s $422 billion deficit would dip to $353 billion in 2005 and to $312 billion in 2006, before slowly rising to $439 billion by 2014. Over that decade, the amount of government debt held by the public would nearly double, to $8 trillion, from $4.3 trillion today.
