January 24, 2005
The Deficit
I'm playing around with tables and graphs, and here's one that I know I've seen before, but it's still really interesting to look at.
This is how our budget has looked over the past fifteen years or so. Those year markers are the beginning points of each President's term. It plots the deficit numbers and how Social Security affected those deficit numbers.
What I'd like to do is get more numbers. I think I can find most of it through the CBO website. Like, projected Social Security behavior versus projected budgets.
But what I'd really like to find is a nice tabular format of data of Bush's prior year projections, and how they compared to what really happened. You know, "Here's Bush's 2001 projection of the next few years. And here's what really happened. Here's Bush's 2002 projection of the next few years. And here's what really happened. Here's Bush's 2003 projection of the next few years..." Etc.
Something like this graph about Bush's job growth projections:
Right so you're saying that in 7 out of 8 years, Clinton was spending the social security surplus on military adventures in Bosnia and Kosovo? Or not? And maybe in the 8th year, if the economy hadn't been in a bubble, he still would have been spending the surplus? Or do you believe that if Al Gore had been elected, Yahoo would still be trading for $350 a share? Right.
Why don't you chart social security expenditures as a % of GDP, which would show why we need to find a better way of financing the system?
Posted by: Pepik at January 25, 2005 01:37 PMSure, I'm interested in GDP, I'm partial to looking at it that way.
As for the other stuff, the issue is that Bush is the only guy looking at the Social Security deficit as being a problem with Social Security. The budget borrows from the Social Security surplus, there's no point in denying that. But Bush is the one that doesn't think he has to pay it back.
The reason that is an issue is that it's a progressive system borrowing from a regressive system, and not paying it back. It's out of balance.