Billions borrowed

I found a short article in the business section of your Aug. 1 edition disturbing. Many of your readers may have missed it; it was titled, “Tax cut, weak economy could force government to borrow $51 billion,” and it was next to an unrelated picture of purple ketchup.

As it turned out, the Treasury Department borrowed $51 billion to pay for the rebate checks this quarter and did not pay down $57 billion of the national debt as it had previously intended to do. These rebate checks are part of the trillion-dollar-plus tax-cut package signed by President Bush and supported by Sens. Snowe and Collins.

Weren’t the rebate checks supposed to come out of the surplus? Why does the Treasury Department need to borrow to pay them? What happened to the surplus? And who pays the interest on this multi-billion-dollar loan? For heaven’s sake (to quote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor), what’s going on here? Fuzzy math (to quote George Bush), except this time, the president did the figuring.

It’s going to get interesting.

Jim Aucoin

Bangor