It Could Be Krugman..

..But it's not.

The latest dire warnings concerning Bush spending in the face of deficits and decreased tax revenue comes from Robert Hormats.

Hardly a 'liberal,' Hormat was adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton on the economy.

A snippet:

"Big deficits now mean tax increases, higher interest rates and/or dramatic cuts in government services later on," he says. A lot of damage is being done to the long-term outlook by current fiscal policy."

Almost every time we have gone to war in the past, Hormats notes, we have cut spending and raised taxes -- not the other way around. Even Lyndon Johnson put through a surtax in 1968 to help finance the Vietnam War and the Great Society programs.

By contrast, in the current Bush administration, discretionary government spending has gone up an average of 8 percent a year, which is a very large amount.

Says Hormats: "We have increased military spending, and we have had big increases in nonmilitary spending and big cuts in taxes. This is breathtakingly short-sighted. Whatever benefits we enjoy now, future generations are going to suffer from that short-sightedness. People looking back 10 years from now are going to be very angry with policy makers in Washington today who are shifting the bill to coming generations."

But won't we be able to grow our way out of deficits? Won't the gross domestic product grow so much that it will absorb the deficits?

"Nobody believes that," responds Hormats. Deficits declined in the 1990s in part because military spending was declining. We had big "peace dividends" as a result of the end of the Cold War. But they are gone.

In the years ahead, as we struggle to set priorities, perhaps we can recall the words of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children."

Link to entire article.

Hormats' views echo that of Paul Krugman - who has been much maligned by the Right in this country.

Bush's economic stewardship has been nothing short of abysmal. Does this fellow deserve another four years to further plunder the treasury?