Soapbox

Todays Grain of Salt

Any time the President of the United States speaks, it is important to have a grain of salt or two standing by to take with whatever he says. All presidents spin, but this guy is a whirling dervish.

Today the White house will dress George Bush up in his Sunday best and send him out to tell us all about how GREAT the economy in America is thanks to his tax cuts! Ok sure, more people than ever (including children) have no health insurance, more Americans are living in poverty every year and the cost of higher education has gone up 40% in the last 5 years, but the Bush administration will pat themselves on the back because the deficit is slightly smaller than they thought it would be earlier this year! Yahoo! What a great fiscal conservative that man is!

What you need to remember, and what the White House very much hopes you won’t, is that the fabulously small $300 billion deficit was predicted by President Bush to be a $305 billion surplus just a few years ago! And of course there was that pesky $5.6 trillion surplus that Bush started his presidency with, which is long, long gone.

Bush will remind us that after all, he has been paying for a war, which is why being $300 billion in the red is supposed to be such a good deal. Strangely, some of us don’t think that the war is a good excuse for the loss of $5.9 trillion dollars from the American economy. Not only should this war have cost us a hell of a lot less ( the president never asked the Provisional Authority to even begin to look for the $8.8 billion that they misplaced- ditto for the millions that Halliburton lost track of or wasted…and why are we paying $450 million for a tank that we aren’t even getting?) it was also completely unnecessary. And since terrorism has increased rather than decreased, even if every penny was spent properly, it was a still rip-off!

It is important to remember when the president and FOX news pundits wax eloquent on how great the economic numbers are, where we used to be 6 years ago. It wasn’t all roses, but it was NOT staring down the barrel of 4 potential North Korean nuclear warheads. It was NOT watching our children come home in boxes from a sad and scary debacle in the desert that has made terrorism worse, not better. And it was not $300 billion in the hole and claiming we were on top of the world!