http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/105
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 09/07/2006 – 5:15am. Alerts
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
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Though the Bush Administration’s official budget lists the national debt and deficit as being incredibly high, they are actually far worse than reported, according to Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN). But don’t just take his word for it, even if Cooper is a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Law graduate. The following figures appear in the official U.S. Financial Report, released by the Treasury Department:
* The true national debt is $49 trillion, not the $8.3 trillion Bush reported
o That’s $156,000 for every citizen, or $375,000 for every working American
o This figure has more than doubled in the past five years
o We paid $327 billion last year on interest alone
* The true 2005 deficit was $760 billion, not the $318.5 billion Bush reported
o This is 6.2% of the GDP, not 2.6%
* It’s all getting worse
What accounts for the huge discrepancy? Unlike businesses, the government uses “cash” instead of “accrual” accounting. This means that the government does not report future spending promises like Medicare and Social Security, or even future spending guarantees like veterans’ benefits and federal employee pensions.
“Cash accounting tells you what’s in your bank account. Accrual accounting tells you what’s in your bank account and what’s on your credit card statement,” Cooper told BuzzFlash in an interview. “Whether you’re promising to buy a road or something at Target, you need to know what you promised to buy. That should be a binding obligation of the government. We’ve made a world of promises to folks that we need to keep.”
But wait, there’s more! The U.S. Financial Report does not mention that if Medicare and Social Security are factored into the equation (which the Treasury Department did not), the true deficit was actually a whopping $3.3 trillion last year, over ten times more than Bush claims. And when Social Security projections are adjusted to reflect current life expectancies instead of the old 75-year mark, Cooper said the true national debt is “probably closer to $65 trillion.”
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All I can see is Claude Reins in Casablanca being “shocked” to find gambling going on at Rick’s!
Here’s a Democrat “shocked” to find that the Republicans are using cash accounting as opposed to accrual accounting.
Err, Representative Jim, what did Bill, or any of the other Democratic Presidents, use?
While I think its a valid criticism, it’s a criticism of big gubamint in general.
And our posterity will get stuck with the bill.
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