Bush Administration Plans For World Peace!
As you may have heard, the latest White House proposal for the federal budget amounts to a bazillion gazillion dollars, give or take a jillion. The great news is that, according to White House calculations, the budget deficit has been cut in half, a feat achieved primarily by running up the deficit to such grotesque levels that the halving of it is like drinking too much and then passing out.
[The average HuSite has no problem understanding that reference!]
The "mandatory" portion of the budget, the entitlement programs, is surging. Health care is a grave concern. Baby boomers are reaching retirement and they're all going to want new hips. ... [Paging Mr Ha. ...]
We must do something,... But this involves discomfort, disappointment, recriminations. Fewer benefits or more taxes. [And who wants that?]
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Including what we owe to ourselves for our many years of spending the Social Security money that we were pretending to save, the debt stands at approximately $8,821,053,163,042. [I like that "approximately".]
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Eight trillion 800 billion and change.
Is that a lot? You might want to think about it, since you owe it.
To the Chinese, among others. [The others include the Saudis. Now do you understand US foreign policy?]
THE FEDERAL BUDGET IS FUNDAMENTALLY A DULL AND TEDIOUS SUBJECT, like topsoil erosion, only not as glitzy. The national debt in its wildest fantasies wishes it could be as sexy as global warming. ...
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[Why is it impossible to balance?] "It's because it is politically much more popular to be for every tax cut and every spending program. That's what this president has done. It takes a while for the folly of this fiscal policy to be revealed," Conrad [D-Somewhere In The Dakotas] said. "The only thing that fixes it is our political will. And the citizenry rising up to tell our elected representatives to stop this."
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But the citizenry does not rise.
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In 1979, during Jimmy Carter's [famously liberal, according to conservatives] presidency, federal outlays were 20.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. In 2006 [during the supposedly conservative Bush Presidency], they were 20.3 percent.
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the dead of winter is Budget Season in Washington.
At this very second, somewhere in town, men and women are examining tables filled with numbers, most of which, out of convenience or perhaps shame, have had the last six zeros deleted. When dealing with items like Social Security and Medicare and the Pentagon, you can get away with lopping off nine zeros. You know you've hit the big time when you can round to the nearest billion.
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according to OMB, the government has spent $426.8 billion on the war, ... asking for another $235.1 billion ... through the end of the 2008 fiscal year. OMB's five-year budget plan,..., projects only $50 billion for the war in 2009, and no money at all in 2010, 2011 and 2012. It anticipates peace, in short.
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The hard copy of the president's budget comes in four volumes, the real star of which is the Appendix. It's 1,237 pages, with tiny type and two columns per page.
This is where you learn about obscure budget items such as the Helium Fund, the Rural Electrification and Telecommunications Liquidating Account, the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance ($200,000 to "to revitalize the commemoration of Memorial Day") and the United States Institute of Peace (shouldn't its employees work harder?).
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Lobbyists know how to get an earmark in the middle of the night when no one's looking. Thus millions might get splurged on a "Bridge to Nowhere" in remote Alaska even as, for example, outpatient war veterans at Walter Reed live in squalor.
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The scariest person when it comes to the budget is David Walker, the comptroller general at the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. ...
Consider, he says, Medicare's newly added prescription-drug benefit. We'd have to have $8 trillion right now [we don't], invested in Treasury bonds, to cover the gap between what we've promised in that program and what we expect to receive in premiums over the next 75 years, by his calculation. The Social Security gap is $6.4 trillion, he says, and the total Medicare gap is $32 trillion. Overall "unfunded commitments" of the government total about $50 trillion, Walker says.
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... The Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, [says] federal debt could rise from 37 percent to 100 percent of GDP. And then could keep rising "exponentially."
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"If you take that $50 trillion," says Walker, "that's $440,000 per household."
Is the Republican Party doomed? The Whigs were replaced by the Republicans over the issue of abolition of slavery. Fairly quickly, too. Could the Republicans be going the way of the Whigs? Have our lip-smackingly self-satisfied President and his toadying clique of yes-men destroyed any chance the Republicans have of being more than a regional party catering only to the social conservatives in the Deep South? That's the question Andrew Sullivan is asking.
Add them up. We witness another horrifying suicide bombing in Iraq... U.S. attorneys were leaned on by Republicans ... to bring cases against some Democrats - and the ones who refused were then fired. The vice-president's closest aide has been found guilty of perjury ... The guiltier parties - Rove and Armitage and Cheney - are still in power. We now see shameful neglect of injured veterans under the very noses of the defense secretary. On the intellectual front, we have now seen a conservative icon reveling in bigotry in full view of the national media ... Any one of these stories individually is damaging. Together, they exert a hurricane-strength storm on the Bush administration and the conservative movement.
...They are ruthless operatives who abuse the system for partisan ends (DeLay and Domenici). They are nasty bigots (Coulter) or theocons sympathizing with Islamists (D'Souza). They are perjurers (Libby) or cowards (Rove). Our future fiscal health is far, far worse than it was in 2000 [see above]. Climate change looks more and more real and they have no serious policy to deal with it.
Now realize that no major Republican candidate has the backing of the base and the elites. ... The eclipse of old-style, limited government, realist, inclusive conservatism [my sort] by the new pro-torture, left-baiting, homo-hating, debt-building, war-losing apparatchiks of the Rove machine could lead to most moderate Republicans and Independents voting Democrat or staying home next year. ... this feels to me like an implosion. ... Only once the GOP wakes up and realizes it has become a nasty rump of Dixie will some see how deep the damage of the Bush years goes.
One thing I suspect, though. Only Hillary can save them now.
... back in the 60's and 70's, the Democrats wasted money and started wars (which was why I chose to register Republican). Now that war and waste have become the mantra of Republicans...[he's now a Democrat]
Under George W. Bush, the United States has become more disliked in the world than Kim Jong Il's evil dictatorship. That is, of course, an insane degree of anti-Americanism. ... While Bush and Cheney have ground America's hard power into the sands of Anbar, they have all but destroyed America's soft power across the world. It's quite a legacy they leave.His Type Of Conservativism
I'm a believer in individual freedom, small but strong government, free speech, free trade, secular politics, and the pursuit of happiness ......So call me a Tory Whig, if you must. There are more of us around than you think.
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