Do you do your budget for ten years out?

Congress does, and they're rarely anywhere near close to accurate. How come Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom, etc., can't cook their books with shell games and creative money tricks...but our federal government can?

AP Story: "Analysis Sees Deficits Growing Under Bush"

Even before the cost of Hurricane Katrina is added to the federal ledger, a Congressional Budget Office study commissioned by Democrats predicts President Bush will fail to keep his promise to cut the deficit in half by the time he leaves office.

The study by the nonpartisan CBO assumes that Congress will heed Bush's call for new tax cuts and for making those passed in 2001 and 2003 permanent. It also assumes a big slowdown in spending on the Iraq war, tight caps on domestic agency budgets and new individual Social Security accounts.

Anyone see the irony of the two statements stressed above? Democrats? Nonpartisan? Anyway, continuing:

The study predicts that the $331 billion budget deficit projected for the current budget year would rise to $370 billion by 2009, the year Bush has promised to cut the deficit to at least $260 billion. Bush promised to cut the deficit in half from a projection in February 2004 of a $521 billion deficit for 2009.

By 2015, the deficit would hit $640 billion under CBO's study.

Like I said above, a ten-year budget forecast? TEN? Hell, these guys are wrong every year, so we should believe them when they tell us TEN years? Continuing:

"Instead of complaining about the deficit, how about doing something about it?" said Bush spokesman Trent Duffy, noting that Spratt opposes Republican efforts to trim just $35 billion from federal entitlement programs over the next five years.

How about doing something about it?? How about vetoing a damned spending bill...or ANY freaking bill...for ONCE in your term, Mr. President? Good grief, he's ready to veto a bill that adds additional federal funds to stem-cell research (which I agree with, but for a different reason: it's not the federal government's job to fund ANY medical research); but he refuses to veto a bloated, pork-laden spending bill? Since elected Democrats started acting more like socialists, did that mean that Republicans had to start acting more like Democrats?

Democrats got complacent and arrogant over the course of 40+ years of ruling the House. Republicans won total control of Congress in 1994 by promising to roll back the Big Government mentality, massive reforms to entitlements, abolishing unnecessary federal departments (like Education), giving states more power that the federal government had unconstitutionally usurped, cutting taxes, and getting spending under control. With the exception of welfare reform in 1996 (which Clinton signed in order to get re-elected...it worked) and tax cuts, none of those other things occurred!

Instead, Republicans have now become drunk with power, arrogant in their ruling, and abandoning most of the platforms that they ran on 11 years ago. The government is more bloated than ever. I realize that Democrats would be no better and would likely be worse, especially given their disdain for the military (don't try to defend them...I can point to decades of reliable anti-defense votes and rhetoric). But I do have to wonder: how long until the American public gets fed up with this and votes smooth-talking and deceptive Democrats into power, over equally deceptive Republicans?