• The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, on tax cuts, spending The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, on tax cuts, spending Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s warning that ballooning federal deficits are “unsustainable” should be a much-needed splash of cold water for a White
• The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, on tax cuts, spending
The Buffalo (N.Y.) News, on tax cuts, spending
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s warning that ballooning federal deficits are “unsustainable” should be a much-needed splash of cold water for a White House that too often puts ideology before fiscal reality.
Greenspan thinks the problem demands spending cuts and a reassessment of efforts to cut taxes. The Bush administration and congressional Republicans think he’s only half right. They ought to be listening with both ears.… The deficit problem is driven more by Medicare than Social Security. The federal government has passed huge entitlement increases, primarily a Medicare prescription drug benefit, at the same time it has cut its own revenue by “temporary” tax cuts that the White House still wants to make permanent. Anyone who prepares a household budget knows what happens when you increase expenses while losing income.…
Regardless of what Vice President Cheney thinks, deficits do matter. They pay for current needs by mortgaging the country’s future. But those bills eventually come due. Greenspan is right to worry that everincreasing debt, plus ever-increasing interest costs on that debt, could mean disaster when that debt collides with increasing baby boomer Medicare and Social Security obligations, let alone the costs of wars.…
The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash., on disclosure laws
Self-preservation is human nature, and so it is not surprising when someone tries to hid a potentially embarrassing or compromising bit of information about himself. That instinct leads some government officials to keep their dealings secret. Problem is, the information they want to keep under wraps isn’t primarily about them. It’s about us….
That’s the aim of public disclosure laws — to make sure private citizens can get at the information that affects their daily lives, whether they know it or not. …
Sunshine Week, an effort spearheaded by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is intended to highlight the importance of public disclosure laws and to call attention to their erosion. Journalists’ fight against government secrecy is the public’s fight; reporters and editors just are the first to notice encroachments on the public’s right to know.…The fight will never end because government will always be a human endeavor. The people we put in charge need constant reminders that they avoid embarrassment at the public’s peril and eventually, their own. It’s not about them. It’s about us.
From the Associated Press
