From The Niagara Falls Reporter, 11/30/04:
http://niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher191.html
GOP CONGRESS WRECKING U.S. ECONOMY
By Bill Gallagher
DETROIT --
The Republican House of Representatives has helped create the largest
deficit ever, spent shamelessly on pork-barrel projects and corporate
welfare, passed the Tom DeLay criminal protection rule, thwarted the
9/11 Commission's recommendations on intelligence reform, approved a
measure permitting the Appropriations Committee's top leadership and
their staffs' access to any American's tax return, given lobbyists
unprecedented access and key roles in crafting legislation and stuck
it to 90,000 needy college students.
The lame-duck 108th Congress is awful, and with bigger majorities in
each House, peppered with new and even wackier hypocrites from the
religious right, the 109th will be worse and the tyranny of the
majority will be felt in many ways.
The Congress is an equal partner in George W. Bush's reckless
borrow-and-spend fiscal policies and their radical record --
squandering the Treasury mostly to benefit the wealthy and then
passing off the unconscionable debt that results to middle-class
working people -- will only get worse.
The Bush deficit for 2004 was $413 billion -- a record in dollar
amount -- but as a percent of gross domestic product (3.6 percent),
it's less than the records Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder racked up.
So the White House, their co-conspirators in Congress and
pseudo-conservative pundits say, "Don't worry. When the economy really
gets humming again and we privatize Social Security, and go to a
national sales tax or a flat tax ... poof, no more deficits."
But unlike the president, a messianic Calvinist who "prays over" these
issues, I find myself drawn to the facts and the sobering empirical
data crunched with simple arithmetic.
That would separate me from George W. Bush, a Harvard MBA, and his
fiscal policy advisers who find fundamental addition and subtraction a
threat to their faith-based "economic security plan."
In a revealing piece in the Oct. 17 "New York Times Magazine," Ron
Suskind spoke to a White House aide who dismissed critics of the
administration who belong to "what we call the reality-based
community."
As a card-carrying member of that group, along with tens of millions
of other Americans who still know how to count, I find the Bushites'
permanent trip into fiscal Fantasyland frightening.
The reality is, this marks the first time since World War II that the
deficit grew for four straight years, and there is no end in sight.
This also marks the first time since before the Great Depression that
the deficit has continued to increase this far into a recovery.
Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder raised taxes to stop the hemorrhaging
of red ink in their administrations, something George W. Bush will
never do.
For him, it is an article of fundamental political faith that no tax
can be raised and more taxes should be cut, regardless of the
implications for the nation's fiscal health.
Stunning revenue declines are good for us.
Since the president and Jerry Falwell have prayed over this, I guess
we should stop worrying about higher interest rates, the declining
dollar and a generation saddled with paralyzing debt.
It's all God's will.
___________________________________________________________
Just pray and all those bad, mean ole deficits and the mountainous
debt will disappear. So what're you worried about.
Harry
.
|
