O'Neill concerns 'fell on deaf ears'

FORMER US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed his concerns about the rising budget deficit before axing him from President Bush's economic team.

O'Neill said he tried to warn Cheney that growing budget deficits - expected to top $500bn (£270bn) this year alone - threatened the US economy. But Cheney cut him off.

'You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter,' he said, according to excerpts from a book, The Price of Loyalty, by Pulitzer Prize winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, based on interviews with O'Neill.

'We won the mid-terms (Congressional elections). This is our due,' Cheney is said to have added. A month later, in December 2002, Cheney gave O'Neill his marching orders.

In the CBS network interview, O'Neill also said that, at Cabinet meetings, Bush was disengaged, like 'a blind man in a room full of deaf people'.