Bullet Points that startle rather than Kill

Found an interesting web location that objective readers may be keen on clicking over to. Props to the Proponents of Reason to putting me on to it.

Check out some interesting bullet points (which incidentially, I name, "Silver Bullets" for reasons of irony) that make for curious reading for all regarding our future as dictated by the theocrats in the "Right"House:

Silver Bullet 1 : Despite cuts to scores of domestic programs, the Administration’s budget increases rather than decreases the deficit over the next five years.

Silver Bullet 2: Over the longer run, by proposing to make its tax cuts permanent, the Administration’s budget proposals would dramatically swell the deficit.

Silver Bullet 3: For the first time since 1989, the budget fails to provide information about the funding of specific discretionary programs beyond the upcoming budget year, thereby hiding the impact of the large discretionary cuts it is proposing.

Silver Bullet 4: The Administration insists on its practice of budgeting for only five years, masking the full cost of its tax cuts, while it simultaneously insists on using “infinite” or 75-year time horizons in other contexts.

Silver Bullet 5: In 2006, the cost of the tax cuts already enacted since 2001, plus those proposed in this budget, would be $193 billion (without interest payments).

Silver Bullet 6: The budget also includes a major new tax cut that the Congressional Research Service has said eventually would cost $300 billion to $500 billion over ten years, but the budget uses a timing gimmick so that this tax cut would save money in the first five years and the large long-term costs of the tax cut are thereby hidden from view. The years in which the tax cut would swell the deficit would be outside the Administration’s “budget window.”

Silver Bullet 7: The budget also leaves out all of the costs of funding military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global war on terrorism that will be incurred after the $80 billion the Administration has requested for 2005 is exhausted. CBO estimates these additional costs could total around $350 billion over the next 10 years (excluding interest payments on the debt), assuming an eventual phasedown of U.S. activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Silver Bullet 8:The budget appears to be designed to obscure some of the effects of the policies the Administration is proposing. It is constructed in a way that conceals the fiscal effects of various Administration proposals that would increase the deficit, as well as the consequences of various cuts in domestic programs proposed as a means to deal with the deficit.

Silver Bullet 9: The cost of the President’s proposal to divert Social Security payroll taxes to establish private accounts is not included in the budget. That proposal would add more than $750 billion in deficits and debt in 2006 through 2015, according to the White House, although that number is misleadingly low. It is misleading because the President’s plan would not begin to take effect until 2009 and eligibility for the accounts would be phased in over three years. Over the first ten years that the plan actually would be in effect (2009-18), it would add about $1.4 trillion to the debt. Over the next ten years (2019- 28), it would add about $3.5 trillion more to the debt. All told, the plan would add $4.9 trillion (14 percent of GDP in 2028) to the debt over its first 20 years.

Silver Bullet 10: Administration Acknowledges Private Accounts Would Do Nothing to Improve Social Security Solvency.

Silver Bullet 11: A reporter subsequently asked the senior Administration official: “. . . am I right in assuming . . . that it would be fair to describe this as having — the personal accounts by themselves, that it would be fair to describe this as having — the personal accounts by themselves as having no effect whatsoever on the solvency issue?” The senior Administration official replied: “That’s a fair inference.”

I could go on, but you get the idea. End of the bullets.

Further details can be found at the the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' web location

Is anyone else out there as shocked to find people still supporting this administration? Well, then again, just about over half the country is forgiving the man for lying to them about WMD. So, the lemmings follow off the cliff, and the remainder suffer for it.