An Accuracy Deficit Won't Help Close Rhode Island's Fiscal Deficit

The Emergency Campaign for Rhode Island’s Priorities wants to blame George W. Bush for the state budget deficit…

In fact, a significant state deficit is due to slashed spending by the Bush Administration in order to fund deep tax breaks for millionaires.

Yet most other states aren’t facing defecits, they are running surpluses. If the problem is Federal level tax-cuts, then why is Rhode Island one of the only states affected?

There are further problems with the ECRIP position. It's not really accurate to say that tax breaks that are being "funded" by the Federal Government at the expense of other programs. First, the actual amount of revenue collected by the Feds has gone up since the 2003 tax cuts. Even more directly, the Bush administration has presided over major increases in social spending. Here are the statistics from USA Today…

A sweeping expansion of social programs since 2000 has sparked a record increase in the number of Americans receiving federal government benefits such as college aid, food stamps and health care.

A USA TODAY analysis of 25 major government programs found that enrollment increased an average of 17% in the programs from 2000 to 2005. The nation's population grew 5% during that time…

It was the largest five-year expansion of the federal safety net since the Great Society created programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s.

Spending on these social programs was $1.3 trillion in 2005, up an inflation-adjusted 22% since 2000 and accounting for more than half of federal spending. Enrollment growth was responsible for three-fourths of the spending increase, according to USA TODAY's analysis of federal enrollment and spending data. Higher benefits accounted for the rest.

If ECRIP wants to address the budget problem in an honest way, they need to explain why Rhode Island has been unable to take advantage of the current economic and policy climates to meet its needs in the way that most other states have.