President Bush on fiscal dicipline

[NormMessinger]

Bush Action on Fiscal Discipline Doesn't Follow Rhetoric

Congress will be returning to Washington against its own wishes to finish up
the budget for fiscal year 2004, which officially started two months ago
today. But even as President Bush has maintained that it's imperative to
"continue this notion of reminding the investors and consumers alike that
we're going to have fiscal discipline in Washington, D.C.," he's done
little to promote it himself, with government spending increasing more than
27 percent in the previous two fiscal years. In fact, the investor class
he's reminding of fiscal discipline in Washington is warning that, "The U.S.
budget is out of control," as asserted weeks ago by Wall Street investment
firm Goldman Sachs & Co.

Read the full Mis-Lead -->
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1332679&l=10359

[Meerkat]

One wonders which corporate multinationals would profit by the bankruptcy of the US Treasury? I don't think you have to look much further than the corporations represented in the shrubbery cabinet. An economic coup d'etat!

[ 12-01-2003, 04:08 PM: Message edited by: Meerkat ]

[Meerkat]

Fascism

Fascism: a regime that exalts nation and race above the individual and that stands for a centralized government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition (Webster's definition)

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I call these elements Fascist. You may not like names and labels but technically as well as journalistically and morally they are correct. You may substitute Tories, or Economic Royalists, or Vested Interests, or whatever you like for the flag-waving anti-American Americans whose efforts and objectives parallel those of the Liga Industriale which bought out Mussolini in 1920, and the Thyssen-Krupp-Voegeler-Flick Rhineland industry and banking system which subsidized Hitler when Naziism was about to collapse. Their main object was to end the civil liberties of the nation, destroy the labor unions, end the free press, and make more money at the expense of a slave nation. -- George Seldes. (1943), Facts and Fascism

[imported_DutchRub]

http://www.hermes-press.com/attack.jpg

[LaMess]

More from the Damn liberal Media. Democrats are ridiculed with the 'tax and spend' moniker. Is tax-cut and spend more a better policy?

The Politics of Payoff

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 2, 2003; Page A27

President Bush likes to talk about the need for "fiscal sanity in Washington." His decision to run up the national debt is entirely sane -- as long as you understand his real purpose. Bush doesn't care a whit about deficits. That's because he is not a fiscal conservative. He is a political conservative out to buy himself a majority in 2004 and spending the next generation's money to do it.


Some act mystified, as if conservatives are always more responsible with the people's money than liberals. But it's possible to be generous toward social needs and pay as you go. That's what liberals have usually done. Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page editor, once called this approach "balanced-budget liberalism." It's conservatives, not liberals, who twice over the past quarter-century have created extravagant deficits.

It's also forgotten that redistribution to the poor is not the only way to shift money around. The government's coffers can also be run down by redistribution to the wealthy and to favored interest groups. And when it comes to the politics of payoff, the president and his allies are nothing short of brilliant. Disgorging public money to your friends makes political sense. By recycling a small fraction of the cash back to Bush and his party in the form of campaign contributions, those friends are financing the construction of a mighty political machine. It's a weird form of public financing of campaigns -- confined to one party.

Bush's first tax cut distributed just enough to middle-class families to give cover for a plan that largely helped the best-off Americans. Next came the dividends tax cut, an even more naked transfer of cash to the wealthy. At least a fifth of the benefits of this year's tax package went to a mere four-tenths of 1 percent of taxpayers, those making more than $500,000 a year. One-third of Americans got nothing, and half got less than $100 a year.

But it doesn't stop there. Public spending per person is higher under Bush than it was under Bill Clinton. Where is it going? A share of it is for big increases in defense spending. Assume all that spending is justified. It still helps build a Republican majority. The people at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and the like give the bulk of their campaign contributions to the Republicans.

The Medicare drug bill seeks to expand Bush's reach to senior citizens. But many of its provisions help core Republican constituencies, including private health plans that get billions to compete with Medicare. Another $25 billion goes to rural hospitals. Troubled urban hospitals don't get similar help, but urban areas didn't vote for Bush. Another $6 billion in the bill for health savings accounts also helps Republican contributors.

The pharmaceutical companies are so generous to Republicans that they might start giving out free Viagra and Lipitor at fundraisers. Drug company executives love it that the drug bill forbids Medicare from using its bargaining power to bring down the cost of drugs. Fiscal conservatives might want to contain taxpayer outlays to the drug manufacturers. Political conservatives prefer to protect their industry friends. Then there is that amazing $31 billion energy bill, blocked so far by genuine fiscal conservatives such as Sen. John McCain. Bush and most Republicans had been fighting hard for the bill's extravagant subsidies to all sorts of special interests, beginning with the oil and gas industry.

And why not? As The Post's Tom Edsall reported, the bill provides benefits to at least 22 executives and their spouses who have qualified in Bush's two top categories of fundraisers. At least 15 lobbyists for interests helped by the bill and their spouses achieved similar Bush MVP fundraising status. Back in the Clinton days, self-styled "deficit hawks" decried efforts to pass universal health coverage on the grounds that doing so might deepen the deficit. Now many of the same supposed deficit hawks happily vote for budget-busting giveaways that benefit their party's ideological and business allies. Politicians who can't say 10 words without praising "free markets" back big subsidies that will tilt the market toward their contributors. Few challenge their capitalist credentials.

Building transit, roads and schools, and helping the young and the poor buy health insurance and get a better education -- these might justify deficits to finance investments for the next generation. Sending us into a hole to buy an election and to help well-connected interest groups just doesn't seem worth it.

The New Big Spenders are very different from the old ones. How long will it take us to understand that?

[Scott Rosen]

The terms “President Bush” and “fiscal discipline” cannot properly be used in the same sentence.

[Meerkat]

Shrubby's fiscal policy in one sentence: "You keep yours - I'll print up more!" :D