CBO contradicts GWB, who are you going to believe?

The LATimes reports that the CBO says: It's a balanced budget or tax cuts, not both.

WASHINGTON — President Bush can balance the budget within five years, or he can get Congress to extend his tax cuts beyond their scheduled expiration, the Congressional Budget Office reported Wednesday — but probably not both.

Bush has said otherwise, committing himself in Tuesday's State of the Union address, as he did earlier this month, to providing Congress on Feb. 5 with spending and tax proposals for fiscal 2008 that would put the budget on a path toward balance by 2012.

"We must balance the federal budget," Bush said Tuesday night. "We can do so without raising taxes."

The nonpartisan CBO, in its annual report on where current spending and tax policies would take the budget over the next 10 years, did not contradict Bush in so many words. But its tables painted an unmistakable picture of a budget that needed an extra infusion of cash or a sharp reduction in outlays if revenue were ever to exceed spending.