Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Kill the New Deal
The administration is asking for another $110 billion for Iraq next year. The total cost of the Iraq War through next year will top $400 billion. Overall U.S. military spending will once again roughly equal that of every other nation on Earth put together: about $450 billion dollars a year.
As the administration celebrates the fact that the deficit is only a little less than $300 billion this year, President Bush has announced “that the time has arrived to make cuts in such major entitlement programs as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” according to the Chicago Tribune. Indeed, the president said, “In the long-run, the biggest challenge to our nation's economic health is the unsustainable growth in spending for entitlement programs; mandatory programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid…To solve the problem, we need to cut entitlement spending.”
Barry Goldwater would be proud. Conservatives have been trying to roll back the New Deal since Truman’s day. Every damned year it’s the same battle, over and over again. There’s just no money to pay for healthcare for people or aid to the poor. Nevermind that every industrialized democracy on Earth has universal health care: we, the United States of America, the richest country on Earth, simply can’t afford it.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 4:29 PM 
