Friday, January 12, 2007

Message to Bush: We Love You, Man!

No, that's not my message to Bush, it's from his base - those wealthy taxpayers who benefitted from all of his tax cuts:

Bush Breaks 150-Year History of Higher U.S. Taxes in Wartime
Iraq is the only major U.S. conflict, except for the 1846-48 Mexican-American War, in which citizens haven't been asked to make a special financial sacrifice. President George W. Bush opposes tax increases, even as the costs escalate far beyond predictions and he calls for more troops.
So, what's wrong with that?
[...] using borrowed money pushes the cost onto future taxpayers, who will have to pay it back with interest.

The war ``is being fought on our children's shoulders,'' said Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. ``You're probably talking about around $750 billion that is going to be spent on this war that will end up not being funded.'' [...]

The cost in Iraq has been growing rapidly and now runs about $8 billion per month, the independent Iraq Study Group estimated last month. The final tally, the group said, could reach $2 trillion once all the bills for caring for disabled veterans and replacing military equipment are counted. That would be more than 30 times what the White House estimated ahead of the March 2003 invasion.
We'll all be long dead and Americans will still be paying for Bush's folly.

I doubt that the president will follow Woodrow Wilson's example from WWI and subject corporations (war profiteers) to excess profits taxes, so maybe it's time for Congress to apply PAYGO rules to this deficit-financed war. It's not an entitlement program in the strict sense of the word, but granting no-bid contracts to war profiteers isn't much different in my opinion.

1 comment:

Lew Scannon said...

One of the great ironies of this war is that those who are profitting the most from it are paying the least while those who are losing the most are bearing the financial burden.