So the US debt balloons to a whopping great $9 trillion in order to pay for Iraq without tax rises or further cuts in public spending. I guess Bush, like a spendthrift ever extending his mortgage, must be relieved that he´s been handed more free money to spend as he wishes. One can understand how Bush, who won´t be in professional politics in another couple of years, can afford to postpone fiscal responsibility till he´s jiffing about in a boat off Kenebunkport, but the American people cannot simply squeeze out of the debt they are being saddled with. At this stage in the game, it looks like there´ll be another Republican in the White House in 2009, so the chickens are likely to come home to roost on the GOP watch. It is extraordinarily sad that politics has come to this – whereby a nation´s very financial security and viability is sold to avoid short-term tough decisions on tax and spend. It used to be that each Chief Executive would put country before themselves, at least to an extent, and would not commit the nation to spending what it simply could not afford. Now such sentiments appear quaint among the merciless hardball politics of Bush and Rove – public money is syphoned off to private corporations who in turn finance the Republican Party and their high office hopefuls; tax is cut on the wealthy to assist them in becoming wealthier still while haphazard cuts are made to welfare and other public programmes; now the national debt is being extended still further to pay for the ill-conceived and badly-planned overseas debacles. I guess the patriot act forbids criticism of the White House and its top secret machinations, but as I sit beyond the borders of the country I so much admire, I am legally allowed to make my thoughts known.
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