http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=16568
From the page: “The $1.73 trillion government spending plan proposed by President Clinton this week, billed as the first “balanced budget” in 30 years, will actually increase the national debt — just as it has been increased each year of the Clinton administration.
“It’s the single biggest lie by the U.S. government in its history,” says Martin Gross, author of “The End of Sanity” and “The Government Racket” and perhaps the only person on the planet actually bothers to read every page of the voluminous document. “This so-called ‘balanced budget’ is the result of the kind of accounting gimmickry that would land businessmen in jail for fraud.”
To achieve what, on paper anyway, appears to be a balanced budget, President Clinton has proposed using the same kind of creative bookkeeping technique the government has used in recent years — but even more of it. The federal government counts as revenue a massive amount of money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund.
Last year, for instance, the federal government claimed a budget deficit of $22 billion. Yet the national debt, the accumulated total of annual budget deficits, rose $188 billion. If the deficit rose $22 billion, the national debt should rise by about the same amount. The difference between the two figures was made up by borrowed money — most of it raided from Social Security, but some from other trust funds set aside for highway and airport construction as well as money from the civil service tax. The same kind of accounting procedures are used in the latest Clinton budget.
“Imagine looting your employees’ pension plan each year and treating the ill-gotten moneys as operating receipts,” explains Steve Forbes, a likely GOP candidate for president in the year 2000. “For the federal government, the moral equivalent is perfectly legal.”
President Clinton is using the “balanced budget” to help sell a 4 percent increase in spending over the previous year — to hire 100,000 new teachers, provide federally-subsidized child care, increase the budget of the scandalized Internal Revenue Service by 10 percent and to expand the insolvent Medicare system.
“This budget marks the end of an era,” President Clinton said in unveiling the plan, “an end to decades of deficits that have shackled our economy, paralyzed our politics, and held our people back.”
But, in fact, Gross, who has testified to Congress on budget matters five times since 1993, points out, the growing national debt is actually costing American taxpayers an extra $100 billion a year — the interest needed to service red ink nearing the $6 trillion mark. At the current rate of debt accumulation, Gross estimates the national debt will hit $7 trillion within a few years.”
The issue of deficits and balanced budgets keeps growing. Good discussion at the United States of America Group.
My Weblog 