All right, here it is folks....the Grand Poo Ba is going to lay down the nitty-gritty truth about the federal budget deficit.
http://news.yahoo.com/where-did-mammoth-us-budget-deficits-come-211927495.html
If we choose to believe the data contained in this article we can draw some very clear, crisp conclusions about how the U.S. wound up in the fiscal mess it is in at the moment. Let's review:
1) 1/4 of the deficit is due to the federal budget hawks' flawed projections about how much revenue would be collected over an unspecified period of time. In short, they thought they would collect more tax revenues than they did because the economy did not grow as much as they were anticipating. However, spending projections were based on the revenue projections and the government went ahead and spent money they never received...
This is the equivalent of a Poor Bastard who plans to take a vacation because he thinks he will earn enough money to afford it and when he doesn't earn enough money to take the kids to Disneyland, he goes ahead with his vacation plans and charges the entire trip on his Visa card!
2) 1/4 of the deficit is due directly to the reduction in federal revenues which have resulted from tax cuts beginning with the Bush tax cuts, which largely benefited the very wealthy, but the Middle Class tax cut engineered by Obama as a stimulus measure also contributed to this funding shortfall....
This is known as plain old-fashioned stupidity. It's kind of like a Poor Bastard who goes to his boss and says, "You know, bossman, I don't think I need all the money you are paying me and, in fact, I think I could manage with even less than you are paying me, so why don't you just reduce my pay by 15%?"
3) The remaining 50% of the federal deficit is due to overspending; or to look at it another way, UNDER-estimating the true cost of various programs that are paid for with federal dollars. In the context of the average Poor Bastard and their household finances, this is referred to simply as "bad budgeting skills."
In the context of government officials, who are entrusted by the public to do a job and do it correctly (kind of like all the Poor Bastards are expected to do every day they show up at the rock-pile) this is known as "professional incompetence."
