On the move!
Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.
Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.
Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!
—Ian King, December 13, 2004
Friday, April 11, 2003
Notice a trend among U.S. federal government deficits over the last quarter-century? I do. The Democrats are accused of being tax-and-spenders, but then what the hell do you call the GOP? Borrow-and-spend?
More bad news for those in the U.S. who are comewhat concerned about their government’s fiscal position: The latest monthly budget review from the Congressional Budget Office shows that in the first six months of the current fiscal year, the U.S. deficit totalled $248-billion, and that’s in greenbacks, not loonies. In the same October-March period last year, the deficit was $132-billion. Ominously, the CBO also notes in this month’s report: “However, the supplemental appropriation bill currently under consideration would add more than $40 billion to 2003 outlays and the deficit.”
Now, the Bush-boosters will try to claim that the US federal government’s sorry fiscal picture is because of the war. However, the actual figures don’t bear this out. Defence and military spending was only $22-billion higher than the previous year, which accounts for less than one-fifth of the increase in the deficit. The nearly $60-billion fall in government revenue (thanks to Bush’s irresponsible tax-cutting) is a much larger factor. Of course, it seems that the GOP has little problem with spending -- as long as the money that they spend now is collected from future taxpayers.
(Thanks to Mike Bultrowicz, who first found this chart on hail-to-the-thief.org.)
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