DeLay Speaks

On the giant Bush deficits, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) says the deficit is “a spending-driven deficit.” DeLay is actually partly right here–spending increased somewhere around 9% over the last two years, but that’s only around $100 billion. The other $400 billion of projected deficits must have come from somewhere… massive tax cuts for the wealthy–cuts that do little to stimulate the economy. And, throughout that time, the Republicans controlled the House and White House and now control the Senate as well. Yet still, they will blame the spending on the Democrats. The same story has another amusing bit of information: back in April of 2001 when BUsh was pushing his first tax cut the White House projected a surplus of $242 billion for 2003. They were off by over $600 billion!

DeLay on appropriating Homeland Security resources to help his now-faltering Texas redistricting efforts:

“The IG report went and pointed out exactly what we did. We asked for publicly available information. In fact, I think the report pointed out that in order to answer our questions, they went to the Internet to get the answers quicker than they could going through their own processes.”

Of course, the IG report also said that non-public information was used. Also, staff in the Dept. of Homeland Security were gathering that public and non-public information on DeLay’s behalf instead of, say, protecting the country from terrorism.

AB

UPDATE: typo corrected to read “$400 billion”. Thanks RW.