Main | The Iraq Money Grab »

Uh-oh. What happened to all the deficit hawks? Cheney was on Meet The Press this morning claiming that he's still interested in seeing smaller deficits:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I am a deficit hawk. So is the president. The fact of the matter is, weíve always made exceptions for recession, national emergency, time of war. The deficit that weíre running today, after we get the approval of the $87 billion, will still be less as a percentage of our total capacity to pay for it, our total economic activity in this country, than it was back in the í80s or the deficits we ran in the í90s. Weíre still about 4.7 percent of our total GDP. So the notion that the United States canít afford this or that we shouldnít do it is, I think, seriously flawed. One of the reasons the deficit got as big as it did, frankly, was because of the economic slowdown, the fall-off in deficits, the terrorist attacks. A significant chunk was taken out of the economy by what happened after the attacks of 9/11.
MR. RUSSERT: And tax cuts.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tax cuts accounted for only about 25 percent of the deficit.
MR. RUSSERT: But we see deficits for the next 10 years, big ones. How do you deal with that, when you have Social Security, Medicare, coming up?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We anticipate even with the added spending that weíve asked for now weíll cut the deficit roughly in half from where itíll be next year over the next five years. So weíll be moving in the right direction. Weíve got to haveówithout question, weíve got to make choices, weíve got to have fiscal discipline on the rest of the budget. But the idea that we canít defend America or that we canít go do what needs to be done in the Middle East with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, support the troops, rebuild those countries so they never again become safe havens for terrorists to threaten our safety and our security, is silly. The cost of one attack on 9/11 was far greater than what weíre spending in Iraq.

...and yet from the NY Times this morning comes this report of where the deficit is headed. Where is all the money going to come from? Where are the sacrifices needed that Bush keeps talking about? If the top 1% of tax payers didn't take their tax cut, that would be $87 billion right there - the amount the administration asked for from Congress last week!

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