Go For Broke

This isn't an original idea, but I think President Bush and his cronies want to bankrupt America.

How else can you explain the rapid rise in the national debt and the increasing costs of war in Afghanistan and Iraq without any increase in taxes? The headline in the San Francisco Chronicle today says that war costs are up to $10 billion a month. Iraq is more expensive than Vietnam. Who is making a profit off this disaster? And Bush is raising the debt ceiling to nearly $9 trillion. I can't even conceive of that amount of money. The President's solution to the crisis: Go shopping.

The Republicans have long wanted to downsize government. Grover Norquist, Bush's buddy, famously claimed to want to shrink government to a size where it could easily be strangled to death in a bathtub. Bush's economic policies will surely destroy the goal of the Common Good in place since the Roosevelt and Johnson years. And what will replace it? The vicious hand of the global market. It will make the Depression look like a picnic.

In the meantime, we shop, running up personal debt on our credit cards while our government, practicing a fiscal policy that would demand therapy for an individual, sells our debit to the highest bidders, including China. One of these days a lender may decide our credit is no longer good and call in its chips. I've been to India and Guatemala; I know what third world countries look like. It's not nice.

When will the feeble Democrats in Congress stand up and challenge the Republicans who are destroying the government of this nation? Or have they already sold out to the devil (i.e., the lobbyists and the corporations)?