The difference between the Bush’s first budget plan, for the next 10 years and today’s: $8,000,000,000,000.
NYTimes: “The long-term budget forecast has declined as much in the last two years as the total revenue collected by the United States government from 1789 to 1983.”
The reason for some of this shortfall is ‘investment’ to stimulate the economy, but tax cuts and sometimes questionably misdirected hostility are not the same as investing in, say, secondary education. I’m a pragmatist and however unfair, this does work, but to a degree. This would be a choice of someone who prefers short term stimulants to longer term health – cocaine versus cardiovascular fitness (and ‘would be’ might actually read ‘was’, if you believed the rumors).
In the business world, this is the equivalent of corporate investment in longer term revenue by raising executive salaries and actually encouraging competition from other companies, instead of new product developement and cost-cutting existing operating expenses.