Needed: Sacrifice

A detailed analysis of federal budgeting reported this week by David Leonhardt in The New York Times gets directly to the heart of the nation's predicament after decades of deficit spending.

The Times, after analyzing Congressional Budget Office reports going back 10 years, concluded that, while the Obama administration's stimulus spending seems significant, it was not a major factor in the deficits and the overall debt of some $10 trillion.

Yet, before conservative commentators had a chance to blow gaskets in their efforts to make this President Obama's problem, The Times article adds that there is no indication his administration has any realistic plan to slash the deficits down to size.

The report noted that projections in 2001, when President Bill Clinton left office, were for federal surpluses of $800 billion a year from 2009-2012. Projected today are annual $1.2 trillion deficits for each of those years.

About a third of the blame for that massive budget swing is blamed on the policies of former President George W. Bush, including his tax cuts for higher income taxpayers, which reduced revenue, and a Medicare prescription drug program that was seen as favorable to the pharmaceutical industry and outrageously expensive with no mechanism to control the soaring cost of drugs.

The current recession and that of 2001 also played a major role in reducing federal revenue and thereby increasing the

annual deficits and the debt.

President Obama's major contribution to the problem — about 20 percent of the total projected debt — is not the stimulus spending that has been so heavily criticized by Republicans, but the tax cuts he promised to every taxpayer making less than $250,000 a year and his continuation of Bush military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The stimulus programs and President Obama's health care and other proposals only contributed about 7 percent to the total, the report concluded.

The culprit, we might conclude ourselves, has been either runaway spending or irresponsible tax cutting, depending on your point of view. We think both approaches to budgeting have created a perfect storm, which at this point will requires both spending cuts and tax hikes if we ever hope to climb out of the hole we're in.

The security of the United States, in fact, depends upon our willingness to make those sacrifices — like the sacrifices other generations of Americans have always made for the good of the country.