“The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum”
The usually very conservative Financial Times of London is lashing out at the Bush budget. Professional Bush Berater Paul Krugman is lashing out at the Bush budget. It seems that a lot of folks are condemning the budget, everyone but the taxpayers who have been hoodwinked again by the Bush budget flim flam. Married couples with children with get one of those tax advance checks, like those issued two years ago as part of the budget cut. Remember that? The tax advance? Bush “cut” the budget by issuing everyone an early refund and then took the refund back when the April tax bill came.
Well, essentially, that is how Congress decided to pay for the $350 billion tax cut , by putting in the cuts for this year and next and then writing into to the budget that the tax cuts will be paid for by raising taxes (according to some estimates, fairly substantially) in the next five to ten years from now.
Raise your hand if you believe Congress is brave enough to raise taxes rather substantially in an unaccountable future budget.
A bit of Enron/Worldcom accounting is going on and our lame brained public, still high on the fresh feelings of a war victory, is, as usual, numb to the scam.
Krugman charges that the budget is part of an elaborate scheme to significantly cut social spending – Social Security, medicaide, medicare, welfare, education, child and women’s health programs, college tuition programs, environmental cleanup and protection programs, among others – the logic being that the money is no longer in the budget and decisions had to be made. The president will trumpet Iraq and 9/11 and logically use those events to beef up Defense spending and to beef up Homeland Security spending. He will point to long held Republican beliefs of state controlled spending and block grants and turn his back and let the states fend for themselves as they try to fill the void left with little to no federal funding.
All the while he has quietly signed into law a bill to raise the national debt ceiling to $7.4 trillion.
Let me repeat that number, because it is huge and bigger than Reagan budget deficits $7.4 trillion.
Bush says signing the bill doesn’t mean it will go that high, just that the law allows it. As Bill Cosby says, “Rrrriiiiiighttttt.”
If you have paid attention to your own finances and budget woes, you know that borrowing your way out of debt, that living on credit cards when you no longer have the income to support your lifestyle, doesn’t work. It is the foolish folly of 20 year old recent college grads with a shiny new Mastercard, and now, apparently, the official policy of the federal budget process.
And of course, these bills will come due and that is when the choices will be made.
It is sickening to think what cuts will be made or where existing money is going to go.