Today the final Bush budget was published. I’m speechless. What happened to the Republicans? They’ve been kidnapped by Christians with poor math skills apparently.
Republicans are supposed to be about fiscal discipline and small government. Over the last 7 years, 6 of which were Republican Congress plus Republican President, we have seen the largest expansion of government since the Roosevelt years, with absolutely nothing to show for it. At least coming out of the depression there were great public works projects which still serve us to this day.
Chart Credit: Unknown (if it’s yours, let me know)
The proposed $3,000,000,000,000 budget would result in a $400,000,000,000 deficit. I wrote the numbers long hand on purpose, they are enormous, they are egregious, and the are foolish. That’s a $3 trillion dollar budget with a $400 billion dollar deficit. To put this in perspective, the deficit is ~10 times larger than the record profit reported by Exxon this year, one of the largest companies on the planet.
Should this budget be approved, it would account for nearly 20% of the country’s gross domestic product. For what? What are we getting in exchange for this robbery writ large?
We’re not getting health care, we’re not getting retirement, we’re not getting security, we’re not getting infrastructure. What we are getting is fat government agencies and contractors who demonstrate performance for which they would be sacked in the private sector. This has to stop now. Even a budget at parity is no longer good enough, we’ve got to start living within our means and demanding real value for the cash we hand over to our public officials.
Let your Congressional and Senatorial representatives know, this cannot stand.
