The Daily Sandwich

"We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish." -Sir Karl Popper

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Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Wednesday, April 12, 2006

GOP breaks own federal spending record. Again.

It's one thing for economically unsustainable government spending to take place, but quite another for the alleged party of fiscal responsibility to hold every record in the book. Suffice it to say that this isn't the sort of record you want to see broken with each passing month.

Government spending hit an all-time high for a single month in March, pushing the budget deficit up significantly from the red-ink level of a year ago.

In its monthly accounting of the government's books, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday that federal spending totaled $250 billion last month, up 13.7 percent from March 2005.

Government receipts also were up, rising 10.6 percent from a year ago, to $164.6 billion. That left a deficit for the month of $85.5 billion, a record imbalance for March.

Treasury Department officials said that half of the growth in outlays for March represented a $15 billion shift in payments for certain government benefit programs, including Medicare, into March rather than April. The benefit payments were made early because April 1 fell on a Saturday.

The March outlay record of $250 billion surpassed the old mark of $232 billion set in February.

Even though the deficit was a record for March, it was below the all-time monthly high of $119.2 billion, which was set in February.

Keep in mind that the president has yet to veto a single spending bill-- or any bill for that matter-- even though he insists that the multi-trillion dollar tax cuts are making our economy stronger than ever.

Just to drive the point home, one last sentence from the article:

Spending during this six-month period totals $1.34 trillion, up 8.7 percent from the same period in 2005.

The two-front war and upper-class taxcuts were in effect last year, too. Any right-wingers out there care to explain why the GOP is spending even more this year?