Anarchy
The Bush administration is either so bereft of good common sense, suffering from some as yet diagnosed mental defect, or just plain evil, that they are continuing with this budgetary madness which takes away from the poor and gives to the rich and in the process, creates what can only become anarchy and at the least highly increased crime statistics which will affect all Americans, rich, poor, and in between, with the reactions of the hungry and disenfranchised to cuts in programs which benefit these desperately poor Americans.
Americans will feed their families by whatever means necessary.
The Bush administration has, perhaps, gotten this far by appealing to the interests of the rich. However, the rich and well off must finally look at what the Bush tax cuts really mean to the wealthy when there are no food stamp programs; when medicine for a sick child is not available; when families face eviction from affordable housing; when funds for transportation to a minimum wage job are not available.
The Bush administration is friend to no American and only serves the interests of corporate greed and brightens the glint in the eyes of our enemies as they witness the destruction and the complacent and tacit consent of Americans to this continuing destruction of the American standard of living.
This is how we become the victims of terrorists: by allowing these robberies of our long held values to take place, by standing idle and uncounted when the very foundations of American freedom are altered by greed and the machinations of traitors calling themselves patriots.
This is how we lose the respect of the world and this is how we become a defeated country merely awaiting invasion of our shores by enemies who would see us destroyed simply because we were once the strongest country on Earth.
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A Trillion Little Pieces
President Bush's $2.77 trillion budget is fiction masquerading as fact, a governmental version of the made-up memoirs that have been denounced up and down the continent lately. The spending proposal is built around the pretense that the same House and Senate that are set to consider a record deficit of $423 billion will now impose a virtual freeze on everything other than Pentagon and homeland security outlays. The budget writers even fantasized an end to Social Security's lump-sum death benefit — a whopping $255 per recipient — as if Congress would dare to do something so heartless and easy to exploit in an election year.
The point of all these imaginary financial projections is to give the president leeway to cement in place hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts the nation can ill afford and does not need. The cuts were made temporary in the first place because there was no way to even pretend that budgets could be balanced in the future with such an enormous loss of revenue.
Now, to pay for his top priorities — the military and tax cuts — the president is relying on proposed spending cuts. While Congress will never make some of them, it may make others, but only at the peril of the poor and the middle class. Those cuts include basic needs in education, environmental protection, medical research, low-income housing for the elderly and the disabled, community policing, and supplemental food for the needy.
The budget is steeped in campaign-year pretensions, billboarding $65 billion in "savings" across the next five years — more than half of it in Medicare — even as tax revenue is further choked. A Congress up for re-election should be wary of taking that path, particularly as the open-ended costs of the Iraq war dwarf all promised savings.
Mr. Bush was praised last week for calling for an end to dependency on oil imports without dragging out the ill-advised — and meaningless — administration fixation on oil drilling in protected parts of Alaska. Yet there it is, back again in the budget. There is little new in the plan, except for small but worthy initiatives that would be paid for with cuts in equally useful programs already on the books.
The president's plan was, on the whole, depressingly familiar. The administration that produced shattering deficits is at it again. Even the fiction was plagiarized from failed budgets of the past.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
Americans will feed their families by whatever means necessary.
The Bush administration has, perhaps, gotten this far by appealing to the interests of the rich. However, the rich and well off must finally look at what the Bush tax cuts really mean to the wealthy when there are no food stamp programs; when medicine for a sick child is not available; when families face eviction from affordable housing; when funds for transportation to a minimum wage job are not available.
The Bush administration is friend to no American and only serves the interests of corporate greed and brightens the glint in the eyes of our enemies as they witness the destruction and the complacent and tacit consent of Americans to this continuing destruction of the American standard of living.
This is how we become the victims of terrorists: by allowing these robberies of our long held values to take place, by standing idle and uncounted when the very foundations of American freedom are altered by greed and the machinations of traitors calling themselves patriots.
This is how we lose the respect of the world and this is how we become a defeated country merely awaiting invasion of our shores by enemies who would see us destroyed simply because we were once the strongest country on Earth.
___________________________________________________________________________________
A Trillion Little Pieces
President Bush's $2.77 trillion budget is fiction masquerading as fact, a governmental version of the made-up memoirs that have been denounced up and down the continent lately. The spending proposal is built around the pretense that the same House and Senate that are set to consider a record deficit of $423 billion will now impose a virtual freeze on everything other than Pentagon and homeland security outlays. The budget writers even fantasized an end to Social Security's lump-sum death benefit — a whopping $255 per recipient — as if Congress would dare to do something so heartless and easy to exploit in an election year.
The point of all these imaginary financial projections is to give the president leeway to cement in place hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts the nation can ill afford and does not need. The cuts were made temporary in the first place because there was no way to even pretend that budgets could be balanced in the future with such an enormous loss of revenue.
Now, to pay for his top priorities — the military and tax cuts — the president is relying on proposed spending cuts. While Congress will never make some of them, it may make others, but only at the peril of the poor and the middle class. Those cuts include basic needs in education, environmental protection, medical research, low-income housing for the elderly and the disabled, community policing, and supplemental food for the needy.
The budget is steeped in campaign-year pretensions, billboarding $65 billion in "savings" across the next five years — more than half of it in Medicare — even as tax revenue is further choked. A Congress up for re-election should be wary of taking that path, particularly as the open-ended costs of the Iraq war dwarf all promised savings.
Mr. Bush was praised last week for calling for an end to dependency on oil imports without dragging out the ill-advised — and meaningless — administration fixation on oil drilling in protected parts of Alaska. Yet there it is, back again in the budget. There is little new in the plan, except for small but worthy initiatives that would be paid for with cuts in equally useful programs already on the books.
The president's plan was, on the whole, depressingly familiar. The administration that produced shattering deficits is at it again. Even the fiction was plagiarized from failed budgets of the past.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
posted by FancyRage at 10:08 AM
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