Gee, when you put it that way ...

DOBBS: Are you surprised when you focus on the two deficits we just talked about, the trade deficit, and the budget deficit? The budget deficit is 3.6 percent of our GDP. The trade deficit is reaching just almost 6 percent of GDP. And the president is talking about reforming Social Security. Does that surprise you?

BUFFETT: Well, it's an interesting idea that a deficit of $100 billion a year, something, 20 years out, seems to terrify the administration. But the $400 plus billion dollars deficit currently does nothing but draw yawns. I mean the idea that this terrible specter looms over us 20 years out which is a small fraction of the deficit we happily run now seems kind of interesting to me.

Note: Warren Buffett is a very rich and successful man. George W. Bush has failed at nearly everything he's tried. To whom would you go for advice?

Last year I spent a lot of time pouring over pdfs and budget tables, and in addition to being instructional and vaguely entertaining (keep in mind that I'm a nerd) it was a character-building exercise. I think that a lot of folks would benefit from doing the same.

Still, like Kevin Drum, I'm not inclined to do much budget-blogging this year. I've become too cynical. Reading stuff like this all over the place doesn't help. I do find it interesting to watch some Democrats embrace federalism and contemplate a state-oriented strategy (here's the latest example, but there have been many others). It surely makes one wonder what the point of belonging to a political party is: is it to win, to advocate for certain programs, to push for certain principles, or to protect your own? Perhaps it can be said that the parties have neither permanent constituencies nor permanent methods, but merely permanent interests. In any case, I'm coming to despise them both (OK, mostly the GOP). Aside from the social security fight, domestic politics is becoming less and less interesting to me. Is it outrage fatigue? Resignation?

Maybe these guys can solve the problem, but I doubt it until this other issue gets solved.

UPDATE: Hilzoy, Brad and Max, however, can at least muster the will to condemn the clown show. Good for them.

... the other major blogosphere Brads are doing yeoman's work, too.

I am soooo not falling for this:

President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday.

Such limits would help reduce the federal budget deficit and would inject market forces into the farm economy, the officials said.

The proposal puts Mr. Bush at odds with some of his most ardent supporters in the rural South, including cotton and rice growers in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The new chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, and more than 100 farm groups are gearing up to fight the White House proposal. The administration's willingness to push the proposal, despite such protests, suggests how tight the new budget will be.

Most of the subsidies are paid to large farm operators growing cotton and rice and, to a lesser degree, corn, soybeans and wheat.

Mr. Bush would set a firm overall limit of $250,000 on subsidies that can now exceed $1 million in some cases.

I would be overjoyed if something like this actually happened, but I'm confident that the welfare-staters in Congress will put them back in. As is, I suspect, the White House.

I don't mean to ruin Nadezhda's silver lining, but ...

We're Congressional Republicans are spending $2,000,000 taxpayer dollars so that George W. Bush can have a Presidential Yacht?

(Edited: credit where credit is due)

Oh, it was a fine day on Capitol Hill. And clearly too much to expect that the session would end without providing at least several handfuls more of compelling reasons for Congressional reform.

The Omnibus budget bill got caught up in a complicated little wrinkle, for all the world to see on CSPAN. Seems someone (turns out a House Republican) unbeknownst to certainly the Democrats and, according to Sen Stevens, unbeknownst to the Senate Republicans as well, tried to slip a little passage in the volumnious text.

It would have given the Chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees or their "agents" the power to review any American's tax return with no restrictions whatsoever. Josh Marshall has many of the lovely specifics, but here's the core:

Specifically, none of the privacy law restrictions -- or the criminal and civil penalties tied to them -- would apply when the Chair or anybody he or she designates as his or her "agent" looked at your tax return.
[...]
Sen. Stevens of Alaska, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, originally blamed the provision on a 'staffer'. But later, according to the AP, Sen. Frist and "congressional aides" said it was inserted at the behest of Rep. Istook [R, Ok., Chair, House Transportation Sub-Committee of Appropriations Committee].
[...]
At the last minute, Senate Democrats caught the language (keep in mind these omnibus bills can be like phone books), protested and the Republicans beat a hasty retreat. Some of it is discussed in this AP article at MSNBC, though they lamely call it a "tax-disclosure gaffe."

The Republicans are acting like it was all an innocent mistake. And it seems clear that there are Republican senators who didn't know anytihng about it and are pissed. But clearly this was no accident, unless provisions have started to write themselves.

The Kossacks had a field day, live blogging the Senate floor appearances of outraged Democrats. The Republicans must be glad they're leaving town for Thanksgiving right about now.

Courtesy the Washington Post, another installment in the saga of the shift in the balance of economic risk away from capital and toward labor. This time brought to us by the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation.

A significant portion of the skyrocketing deficits is due to declared or likely-to-be bankruptcies in the airlines and steel industries. Deregulation of airlines may have expanded services and reduced the price of flying for us as consumers, but it looks like we may be picking up some of the tab as taxpayers.

Oh, and perhaps we should consider this little item when we're figuring out how to fund the transition cost of privatizing part of Social Security. Although it must be admitted, $20+ billion is easy to overlook when you're talking in fractions of a trillion.

Struggling under a cascade of bankruptcy filings in the airline and steel industries, the government's pension insurance agency said yesterday that its deficit has more than doubled in the past year -- to $23.3 billion.

The figure is so large that an overhaul of the way traditional pensions are funded and insured has become essential, several experts said. Pensions of about 44 million workers and retirees are insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
[...]
"The bottom line seems to be that there really is a PBGC crisis, though to date neither Congress nor the [Bush] administration has been treating it as such," said Dallas L. Salisbury, who heads the Employer Benefit Research Institute in the District.

There are three basic ways that the deficit can be made up: (1) revaluation of assets through a bull market (combined with some "aggressive" portfolio management); (2) increasing revenues through larger premium payments from employers; and (3) taxpayers making up the difference.

Door Number 1 isn't what you'd want to bet the farm on, as hopefully someone learned in 2000.   more »

Forgive me if this has been posted already, but the Economists' Voice, a joint project of Brad DeLong, Joseph Stiglitz, and some other guy, apparently has a website. I'm a little mystified by their decision to use PDFs, but at least the content is good.

Here's an interesing piece by Stiglitz on the deficit, what it means, and what to do about it. Stiglitz, it should be noted, disagrees with the conventional wisdom that cutting the deficit in the 1990s was an important step in lowering interest rates. He is much more concerned about distributional issues and the impact on public investment.

And yes, he is appropriately shrill.