You Choose

We can have deficits until the end of time, or we can balance the budget - as long as everyone pays their fair share.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 — The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted on Wednesday that the federal budget deficit would shrink again this year and could actually swing into a surplus in 2012 — but only if President Bush’s tax cuts expire in 2010.

The agency predicted that the deficit for 2007 would decline to about $200 billion. It would be the third big annual decline in a row, and it would come even though spending on the war in Iraq is expected to remain high this year.

The decline of the deficit comes on the heels of unexpectedly large increases in tax revenue over the last two years and slower-than-expected increases in spending on Medicare.

You cannot keep these massive tax breaks that reward wealth instead of work and expect to balance the budget. And the budget deficit is almost besides the point. The real number that nobody wants to talk about, the words that don't appear in the Times article, is the national debt, which projects to a $28,000 birth tax on every man, woman and child in this country. The debt is $8.6 trillion dollars today, and the debt ceiling has been raised three times since 2003. It's unsustainable and impossible to reconcile. We need to start paying it down before China or some other lending nation decides "You know what, we're not going to let you continue to borrow money from us until you pay some of it back," which would cause an economic collapse.

Also, this projection doesn't include the upcoming supplemental funding for Iraq and the war on terror. The way they fiddle with numbers at the White House would make Enron blush.