Does anybody even remember…

by sam on 11/4/2004

…when the Republicans were the party of fiscal conservatism?

I get the theory that if you starve the coffers, eventually spending will have to be cut, but we’re in the middle of fighting two ground wars, and the war on "terra" isn’t going to end anyime soon. Plus,

We collected about the same amount of taxes in fiscal 2004 as we did in fiscal 1999. But we spent 34 percent more. The total national debt has risen 30 percent in the past four years.

Someone’s going to have to pay for today‘s debt at some point in the future. Any company that I represent would have been given junk bond status ages ago with this type of debt-load (and I’m not talking about absolute numbers, but proportions), and possibly forced into bankruptcy. The national debt is not some mythical number that "doesn’t matter" (in the words of dick cheney) – it’s real money that we borrow from our future, and from our children.

I think that the numbers the government deals with are so enormous that people just cannot comprehend them, so instead of trying, they just treat them as imaginary. We’re the "greatest country in the world" so it’s just a physical impossibility that we might lose our shirts at a national level.

At some point the bill is going to come due. And it’s not going to be pretty. And then it won’t just be the people who earn the most who are going to get hit. It’ll be everyone.

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