As Congress prepares this week to launch a high-stakes battle over whether to raise the legal limit on borrowing, the analyses offer a clearer view of the drivers of the debt -- and of the difficulty of re-balancing the budget without new tax revenue.
Even former U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), who played a pivotal role in pushing the Bush tax cuts, now admits they probably were ill advised:
"Nobody would have thought that all these things would have happened after you cut taxes," Domenici said. "That you'd have two wars and not pay for them. That you'd have another recession. A huge extravaganza of expenditures" for the military and homeland security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "You would pause before you did it, if you knew."
So why are Congressional Republican intent on making the Bush tax cuts permanent--even though "CBO forecasts are unrelievedly gloomy, showing huge deficits essentially forever," according to Montgomery?
No one seems to have an answer for that one.
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