holy crap...so a budget was passed ONLY for the year 2006?
[/qutoe]
Why would you think that?
Is it his fault the economy is tanking and needs a couple trillion in stimulus?
The same reason I did't claim that it was Bush's fault that he gave out those rebate checks in 2001.[/QUOTE
Think growing deficits improve economic growth...
AEI - Short Publications - Japan's Lost Decade
After 1993, the Japanese government pursued a series of fiscal stimulus packages that, by 1999, reached a cumulative total of over $1 trillion. The budget deficit approached 10 percent of GDP--the equivalent of a trillion-dollar deficit in the United States. Government debt has risen to 130 percent of GDP, the highest in the G7.
The additional spending was largely directed toward public works projects, shoring up a weak financial system, and subsidies to the weakest of JapanÂ’s businesses, which, in retrospect, ought to have been allowed to fail. In short, Japan followed a decade of overinvestment in the private sector in the 1980s with a decade of overinvestment in the public sector in the 1990s. While the direct stimulus of government works projects and subsidies to weak businesses kept the economy from falling back into negative growth for a time, the weakness resumed once the direct stimulative effects of the spending packages wore off. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the large stimulus packages went to finance wasteful public works projects and simultaneously abetted the serious misallocation of resources by supporting weak industries rather than strong ones.
As soon as the Japanese economy began to recover, in the wake of powerful monetary and fiscal stimulus after the deflationary crisis of 1995, the Japanese government moved rapidly to raise the tax rate applied to consumption in Japan. This flirtation with fiscal orthodoxy (an attempt to reduce budget deficits by taxing household consumption in a deflationary environment) proved disastrous and threw the Japanese economy back into a sharp recession in 1997. Subsequently, private investment and consumption weakened, and another large program of fiscal stimulus was initiated in 1998 and again temporarily boosted the economy. But the recession resumed in 1999--resulting in yet another stimulus package. That stimulus package boosted the economy, once again temporarily, until JapanÂ’s growth rate turned negative during the second half of 2000.
The most basic lesson about fiscal stimulus to be learned from the Japanese experience is to avoid wasteful government spending. Rather, it is better to reduce tax rates in order to encourage private demand as well as private work effort and investment. JapanÂ’s wasteful demand stimulus created nothing but temporary relief from a chronically depressed economy resulting from underlying deflation and monetary policy that was too tight. The spending in support of public works projects, such as tunnels under Tokyo Bay and railroad lines to underpopulated parts of Japan, would never have been undertaken by the private sector. In effect, the Japanese government used JapanÂ’s huge flow of trapped savings, pushed into government bonds by high levels of economic uncertainty and fear of investing abroad, to finance immensely wasteful expenditures. Had Japan instead reduced tax rates in 1992 to encourage investment and additional work effort, the economy would very likely have begun to recover, provided that the Bank of Japan did not keep monetary policy too tight. In fact, JapanÂ’s only forays into tax policy raised consumption taxes in 1997 while increasing payroll taxes to finance health insurance programs. Both measures reinforced the deflationary pressures from tight monetary policy.
JapanÂ’s tendency to use stimulative fiscal policy in conjunction with the Bank of JapanÂ’s invariably tight monetary policy pushed up real interest rates and thereby caused the currency to strengthen, which reinforced the deflationary tendency already present. Curiously, the Japanese government was never able to recognize the dangers inherent in this deflationary policy mix. Furthermore, advice from the American Treasury Department reinforced this misguided policy.