So, now that i'm all refreshed, and realising that I don't have to spend the next four years defending govt policies, let me bring to everyone's attention this ... http://slate.msn.com/id/2109203/
Some choice snippets ...
Would anyone like to guess what the national debt will be in four years time? I'm think somewhere around $9 trillion.Quote:
If the lame-duck Congress doesn't raise the statutory $7.384 trillion debt limit, which was intentionally breached in October, by Nov. 18, the world's greatest power will run out of cash.
Congress, with the White House's blessing, left town before the election without dealing with the debt limits—but not before passing an appalling, special-interest-written, corporate tax bill that will deprive the government of more than $100 billion in future revenues. That double irresponsibility—the lousy tax bill and the ignored debt limit—was a fitting end to the past four years of essentially one-party rule.
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A Republican Congress working with a Republican president created the massive new Medicare prescription-drug entitlement, passed a new, subsidy-crammed farm bill, committed hundreds of billions of dollars to war efforts, and loaded up on pork-barrel spending. Meanwhile, taxes were reduced—on wage earners, investors, and companies. The end result: We collected about the same amount of taxes in fiscal 2004 as we did in fiscal 1999. But we spent 34 percent more. The total national debt has risen 30 percent in the past four years.
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It's only the willingness of the Chinese and Japanese central banks to buy our debt that keeps us afloat.
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And so, while the moral-values crowd may have won, the fiscal orgy in Washington is sure to continue. Given Bush's mandate and his stated desire to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax (a huge tax reduction), make the temporary tax cuts permanent (ditto), and transform Social Seucrity (massive borrowing), his pledge to halve the deficit by 2009 is absurd.
