9/22/08 It’s handout time in Washington!

Bush wants to make sure that all his best buddies get their cut before he leaves office. We already knew the oil companies were all running the largest profits in their history over the last few years. You may not know, but probably guessed that the defense contractors made out like bandits. Bush has handed out a total of 3 trillion dollars to them –for running an useless war - the defense budget went up 72% since he took office, compared to 0.8% during the Clinton years. Now his friends in finance are getting a trillion dollars in bailout money, rather than be held responsible to fix the problems they created). And you think this bailout is going to fix their problems? Nope, you can bet they’ll be back for more.

“So what about me?” say his other rich buddies. Just watch for the automakers, shipping companies, pharmaceuticals, airlines, health insurers etc to line up for their share. And who’s paying for all this? Why, you and me, of course – the poor, suffering American taxpayers. They just run up the tab (the deficit) and leave us to pay. Under Bush, the national debt has rocketed from 5.5 trillion to 9.8 trillion dollars. The largest previous increase was under – you guessed it – Reagan/Bush, when it went from 1 trillion to 4 trillion dollars (2-5.5 trillion in 2007 $). The interest on our $9 trillion national debt alone runs close to $300 billion (2007), or more than the entire GDPs of Thailand, Portugal, Finland or Colombia. To the tune of $5200 per year for an average family of 4 (compare that to the average $500 “stimulus” check you received, which btw you’re paying for too). And do you think it will be different with McCain in the White House? Since WWII, the Presidents who have had the largest budget deficits during their terms are:

1. R. Reagan 2. G.H. Bush 3. G. Ford 4. G.W. Bush. I think this plot says it all the best.

This plot from the Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank. Remember, this is from December 2006, when the debt was “only” 7 trillion dollars. A more recent view of the deficit can be found at http://www.cbpp.org/pubs/fedbud.htm

The National Debt is now projected at11.2 trillion dollars, and looks like getting a lot worse. Basically, every Republican President after Reagan has enormously increased the debt. This is where your “tax cuts” are coming from. McCain is going to be no different, since this has become the Republican strategy.

BTW I didn’t make up these numbers – they’re from the President’s office. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/pdf/hist.pdf

And this article puts it in perspective – how it’s going to affect your family and your money.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=13209

And just so you can get a comparison of how vast the amounts of money we’re talking about here are - it’s so easy to say a trillion here, a trillion there - a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 dollars. That’s one heckuva lot of money – just see how it compares to GDPs of entire (not-so-small) countries – it’s about the size of India’s GDP – a country with 1 billion people!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)