[adios]

I'll give this a political slant. It's fairly obvious to me that Democrats are going to use the budget deficit as a campaign issue and use their tired old class warfare tactics to attack the Bush 2003 tax cuts and advocate higher taxes in 2006 as way to shore up the budget deficit and repeal the "irresponsible' 2003 tax cuts. If taxes are indeed not too high the Democrats will have a winning issue. Some of opined on this forum that the Democrats stance on taxes is not detrimental to their election chances. I couldn't disagree more. The Democrats say they only want to raise taxes on the rich. Apparently the Democrats definition of rich is a household making $200,000 plus a year. That isn't my definition of being rich and I'm going to guess that most people don't see it that way either. And FWIW IMO most people realize that when you go down the path of raising taxes to shore up a budget deficit that it's a slippery slope and that somehow politicians find a way to spend that money on a lot of "pork." There's a simple answer to the budget deficit "problem" which IMO is way overhyped. Sustained economic growth and a reduction in government spending and the biggest ticket spending items are entitlements. Medicare-medicaid spending is growing at an alarming rate (last time I looked twice as fast as economic growth) and Social Security will be running in the red in 10 years or so. With the aging "baby boomers" population segment, entitlement spending will bring about some severe budget deficits if not corrected. It will take a whole lot more than repealing the Bush tax cuts to shore up entitlement spending.