dc_dux

Bush cut excessive tax rates and increased domestic spending (an average of 7%/yr for discretionary non-defense, non-homeland security)

Why do you think this voodoo economics is any more successful than it was under Reagan?

Bush is reversing the trend? The national debt is increasing faster than any time in history, and the worst of the Bush tax cut impacts havent kicked in yet. Bush will likely need to raise the debt ceiling again in '07, the 4th time in six years.

The bulk of the cost of the Iraq war has been off-budget since its inception because as Rumsfeld said in March '03:

"It makes no sense to try" to come up with cost estimates for a war in Iraq because the variables "create a range that simply isn't useful."

"We have no idea how long the war will last. We don't know to what extent there may or may not be weapons of mass destruction used," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference. "We don't have any idea whether or not there would be ethnic strife. We don't know exactly how long it would take to find weapons of mass destruction and destroy them."

"Until someone decides that there has to be a conflict and that the conflict's over, you're not going to know the answer,"

The cost of the war has been met, for the most part, with "emergency" supplemental appropriations, rather than direct budget allocations in each of the last four budget cycles, primarily by pillaging the SS trust fund in each year, like no president before him.

* FY2003 Supplemental: Operation Iraqi Freedom), made in March 2003, was for $74.8 billion. Passed within a month of the request, the final allocation amounted to $78.5 billion, at least $54.4 billion of which was for the war in Iraq.
* FY2004 Supplemental: Iraq and Afghanistan Ongoing Operations/Reconstruction, for $87 billion, was submitted in September 2003 and passed Congress in November 2003. The final allocation amounted to $87.5 billion, of which $70.6 billion was for Iraq.
* Budget Amendment: $25 Emergency Reserve Fund (Department of Defense - Iraq Freedom Fund) was made in May 2004 and was passed by Congress as part of the Department of Defense appropriations bill in July 2004. Based on Iraq War spending, of the $25 billion appropriated, about $21.5 billion was for the war in Iraq.
* Estimate #1 - Emergency Supplemental (various agencies): Ongoing Military Operations in the War on Terror; Reconstruction Activities in Afghanistan; Tsunami Relief and Reconstruction; and Other Purposes - 2/14/05 was made in February 2005 and passed by Congress in April 2005. The final allocation amounted to $82 billion, of which about $58 billion was for the Iraq War.
* Department of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 2006 (i.e. war funding not initiated by a supplemental request) included $50 billion in a 'bridge fund' for war funding. Based on past Iraq War spending, approximately $40 billion of that can be counted for the Iraq War.
* Estimate #3—FY 2006 Emergency Supplemental (various agencies): Ongoing Military, Diplomatic, and Intelligence Operations in the Global War on Terror; Stabilization and Counter-Insurgency Activities in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Other Humanitarian Assistance—2/16/06 was for $72.4 billion, of which about $60 billion war for the Iraq War.
* Department of Defense appropriations for fiscal year 2007: War funding was initiated by a "placeholder" of $50 billion in the administration's budget released in February. Congress passed $70 billion in a 'bridge fund' for both Afghanistan and Iraq.

WIth two exceptions which were included in the Defense Dept. apppropriation bills, more than $250 billion (and counting) is "off budget"

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire