Who ate the dessert? - deficit mania ignores growth of income gap

No sooner had the unemployment rate dipped from its January high of 10 percent than the media drumbeat began: What will the Obama administration do about looming deficits? The danger, it was made clear, was both imminent and mammoth . . . Isabel Sawhill, a Brookings Institution economist and former Clinton administration budget staffer, wrote in the Washington Post (2/12/10): "From 2001 to 2003, Congress reduced taxes for just about everyone.…The message to the public would be simple: If you want to keep taxes low, you have to forgo some benefits. As my parents used to say, no dessert without the spinach." What very few news outlets mentioned, however, was exactly who had eaten the dessert. Most coverage blamed overall "spending""and particularly benefit programs like Social Security"for the nation's deficit woes (Extra!, 4/10). But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out in a February report (2/17/10), "the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next 10 years."