Tax Cuts and Debt

Dear President Bush:

Your budgeting has been so disastrous that, despite starving social programs such as SCHIP and your own education program, you still ran record budget deficits and increased the national debt by over 50%. Even in the latest budget, your last (thank God), the budget deficit is running at some $400 billion. Now I know you’ll want to blame the Democratic Congress, like Reagan did, so here’s what I’ll do: I’m going to focus on the first six years, when your GOP had total control of Congress. From 2001 to 2006, you Republicans had the majority in the House of Representatives. And the Senate was in the GOP’s hands for five of those six years, with the Democrats holding just a single-seat majority for a little less than a year after Senator Jim Jeffords switch parties. So, we can safely blame this all on you and your party.

You and the Republican Congress slashed taxes, increased government spending (though certainly not on important domestic programs) and fought two major wars. The result? You added about three trillion dollars to the national debt in six years. To be more specific, we’ll look at the first six budgets prepared by you and the GOP Congress, FY 2002 – FY 2007. On September 28, 2001, at the close of FY 2001, the national debt stood at $5.807 trillion, roughly 57% of that year’s GDP, and on September 28, 2007, it stood at $9.008 trillion, roughly 68% of that year’s GDP. (Source: Treasury department web site). That’s an increase of roughly $3.2 trillion in six years, or we can look at it as an extra 11% of our GDP. That is a gargantuan increase for just a six-year period, over five hundred billion dollars per year. It’s a good thing that you’re all “fiscal conservatives.” How bad would it be if you were “fiscal liberals”?

$3.2 Trillion Dollars in Six Years!

That’s how much more our kids have to pay back because you’re a scumbag who can’t take care of money.

The two biggest causes of this fiscal crisis you gave us are your tax cuts and war/defense spending. In this post, I want to focus on the revenue side of the equation, i.e. the tax cuts.

Right off the bat, we have a problem here. When, in this nation’s history, have we ever cut taxes in a time of war? You passed your first tax cut before 9/11. It was the wrong move then, as we should have used that historic surplus to finally start paying of the national debt, which would have shored up Social Security as well. It became an even worse move after the tragedy of 9/11, as a responsible leader would have tried to revoke the tax cuts to pay for the coming war on terror. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you continued to cut taxes well into your first term, even after the new spending on the Department of Homeland Security, the war in Afghanistan, the (ridiculous) war in Iraq, and the massive increases in defense spending. Quick memo: throughout our history, we have always raised taxes in time of war, to gain the necessary funds to fight it, and also to ask for shared sacrifice from the population. You ask everything from our troops and nothing from the rest of us.

At this point, I want to launch a pre-emptive strike against your next talking point. You love to claim that your tax cuts actually increased the government’s revenue, so that we can have tax cuts and all that spending. Hurray! The only inconvenience is that you are completely lying when you say that. Other than that, it is a pretty good point. Here are the actual numbers, liar. The government’s total tax receipts in fiscal 2001, the last year budgeted by President Clinton, were $1.991 trillion. Right after you took office and passed your initial tax cut, the revenue fell. It dropped to $1.853 trillion for fiscal 2002 and to $1.782 trillion for fiscal 2003. That’s in absolute dollars; in real terms, it’s worse. If we use constant FY 2000 dollars, so that we adjust our analysis for inflation, government receipts fell, over that period, from $1.946 trillion, to $1.779 trillion to $1.669 trillion. Because you have an excuse for everything, you insist that initially, the revenue fell simply because of the recession of 2001. While there was a brief recession, it did not last long and there was an actual slight increase in GDP over the course of fiscal 2002 and fiscal 2003. So, the revenue was down despite economic growth, dropping a whopping 14.2% in real terms over the course of just two years. That’s not just a dip in revenue; it’s a fall off of a cliff.
In fiscal 2004, the revenue finally increased a little from the previous year, both in real terms ($1.880 trillion), and in constant 2000 dollars ($1.722 trillion), but both were still below the fiscal 2001 level. In FY 2005, total government receipts finally surpassed the FY 2001 level in absolute terms, hitting $2.053 trillion. That total is, however, still under the FY 2001 levels after adjusting for inflation; in constant 2000 dollars, FY 2005 government revenue was $1.833 trillion. In FY 2006, government revenue hit $2.178 trillion, remaining slightly lower than FY 2001 levels in real dollars, at $1.906 trillion. In 2007, government revenue finally overtook the 2001 levels in both absolute and real terms, $2.344 trillion and $1.987 trillion, respectively. It took six years for revenue to reach the FY 2001 levels. Under normal circumstances, economic growth should always result in increasing government revenues, so it should have increased every single year of your presidency in real terms. If not for your tax cuts, my kids would have far less debt to pay back.

In the budgets prepared during President Clinton’s two terms, FY 1994 to FY 2001, government revenue increased in absolute and real dollars every single year until the very last year, when it took a very small dip.

(Source for government revenues: White House budget website.)

Talking Corruption: Valerie Plame

Dear President Bush:

I’d be surprised if there were, in United States history, a more corrupt administration than yours. If a Democratic president had committed half of the crimes that you have, he or she would have been impeached a good dozen times. The GOP impeached Bill Clinton for lying about something he should never have been asked in the first place.

The Valerie Plame affair, while just one example, serves as a perfect illustration of your administration’s corruption, so it's a good starting point in a long list of your administration's scandals. It started when her husband, Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, entitled, “What I didn’t Find in Africa.” In it, Wilson detailed your exaggerated, cherry-picked, unreliable bullshit (ok, I suppose “unreliable bullshit” may be a redundant use of adjectives– I don’t think there’s another kind of bullshit) claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. This was your way of “proving” the more direct unreliable bullshit claim that Saddam intended to develop nuclear (nukular) weapons, and thus justify your “pre-emptive” attack.

Y’all on the right were stunned! This whole democracy and freedom of speech and press and the right to dissent clearly went too far this time! What the hell did this jackass think that Democracy means, that we get to criticize our Glorious Fuehrer? Maybe you all should have put him in “re-education camp,” or something. Or maybe you could kill his wife, an undercover CIA agent. Wait, that’s it, I’ve got it! You could compromise his wife’s security by publicly releasing her classified identity! What an original idea I have!

Shit, you already thought of that.

So, Robert Novak (herein referred to as soulless bastard) responds to Wilson’s op-ed in his syndicated column for the Washington Post. And he identified Wilson’s wife as a CIA agent named Valerie Plame, who was an operative on weapons of mass destruction.

So who was the source of information for soulless bastard? Well, for one, it was Soulless Bastard. Ok, there may be some confusion here, since you may think soulless bastard and Soulless Bastard are the same person. They’re not: the former (lowercase letters) was the name I just gave to Robert Novak; the latter (capitalized) is, of course, Karl Rove. So, Rove told Novak about Plame, according to Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press, who wrote an article on the forthcoming book from Scott McClellan. That’s right, Scott McClellan, your former press secretary, states in his new book that both Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were directly involved in leaking Plame’s covert identity. Wow. Are you going to argue your own press secretary is a closet Democrat? And what’s more? He also said that when he denied involvement by anyone in the white house, he was knowingly passing along the false information at the behest of Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney and the President himself.

(Apuzzo, 2007)

What?

And nothing came of this. You consistently said that you would get rid of anyone who “leaked her identity,” which soon thereafter turned into, “anyone who committed a crime,” because amazingly no one actually took the heat for committing treason. (Again, I ask anyone to imagine what would have happened to a Democratic administration who did the same thing.) Scooter Libby is the only one who gets prosecuted for anything at all – not for the leak itself, but for lying about it – and you commuted his sentence. You, at the very least, knew about the leaks in your administration and did nothing, and instructed McClellan to lie about it. This by itself is grounds for impeachment; indeed, if it had been a Democrat, the GOP would have had his head on a pitchfork. But you’re a Republican, so you’re above the law.

Only because you’re a Republican and because we have a complicit media did this not cause far more outrage in the country.

Source
Apuzzo, M. (2007, November 21). Former aide blames Bush for leak deceit. The Associated Press.

Response to State of the Union

This is my belated response to the State of the Union speech. I’ve been working seven day weeks, sometimes twelve hours. So, I’m going to go ahead and forgive myself for my lateness.

Dear President Bush,

Nice final State of the Union speech. I think this speech nicely highlights how completely and utterly out of touch you are with what is happening in our country. First, let’s look at domestic issues.

You hardly mentioned the health care crisis. You said: “We share a common goal: making health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans.” First of all, do you really share that goal, because you’ve done absolutely nothing over the past seven years to hold down health care costs. They have been soaring, far outpacing inflation.

We have 47 million uninsured; we have millions more underinsured. And the costs of our health care system are hurting businesses and even fully-insured middle class families who are having trouble even keeping up with co-pays and deductibles.

Your next statement: “The best way to achieve that goal is by expanding consumer choice, not government control.” Really? We already have a privatized system, and that is exactly what is sending costs through the roof. We have to pay for profits all along the system, and we have to pay for ridiculous marketing campaigns from pharmaceutical companies, and we have to pay for incredibly complex billing processes from insurance companies, etc.

Let me make an example out of that country you hate: France. They spend far less on health care as a percentage of their GDP, only about 9% to our roughly 16%. Yet, they cover everyone, and we only cover 6/7 of our population. And the quality is at least just as good. They’re better in every measurable statistic, from the child mortality rate to life expectancy. This is precisely because they have a very simple government-based system. Everyone pays, everyone benefits, case closed. They don’t waste money on ridiculously complex billing process, or idiotic drug commercials, or unnecessary profits. Right, I know, France, like totally sucks, because they like totally didn’t help us jump Iraq after school.

You mentioned, as one method of holding down health care costs, limiting lawsuits. Perhaps alcohol permanently impaired your memory. You already did that, liming lawsuits to no more than $250,000 and, just as we all said, that did not even come close to helping bring down health care costs.

You also talked about taxing and spending. You want to make your tax cuts permanent. Let me ask you a question, when the hell in the history of this country have we cut taxes in time of war? It’s your tax cuts in the midst of fighting two wars that are responsible for adding three trillion dollars to the national debt in your time in office, the vast majority of which was with a Republican Congress. That debt has accumulated despite starving domestic programs.

Oh, but you said you’re cutting $18 billion of “wasteful spending.” Wow! That totally helps after we spend that much in about nine weeks in Iraq.

And as for the domestic economy, you said, “wages are up, but so are food and gas.” This is an interesting way of putting it. Wages have not been keeping up with inflation throughout your term, which means that real wages are decreasing. The real cost of living, furthermore, is increasing even faster than the official inflation rate. Food and energy (especially oil/gasoline), which are necessities, are not only increasing, as you said, but increasing much faster than the CPI.

And you said, “Our security, our prosperity and our environment all require reducing our dependence on oil.” You think? You know, some of us were saying this before it was cool. Then you flaunted the bill that will increase efficiency standards to 35 mpg by 2020. The following criticism is aimed not only at you, but also the Democratic Congress. This bill does not do nearly enough, as global peak oil production, if it hasn’t already passed, is coming soon. This is one of the most serious economic challenges we’ve ever faced, as oil prices will continue to sky-rocket as they have been. On top of that, more and more of the oil that is produced will come from overseas, further hurting the economy in the form of higher trade deficits and a weaker dollar. Plus, more and more of our oil imports will come from despots we don’t like, because that’s where the oil is. (It’s like someone upstairs is trying to tell us something.) That’ll cause major national security issues. Drilling for oil causes ecological problems that threaten our sustainability. And of course, we have those pesky greenhouse gases, the emissions of which will continue to accelerate, while you wait, arms-folded, for China and India to act first.

And the new energy act also called for more corn-based ethanol. This is joke of historic proportions. It takes roughly the same amount of energy to raise the crops as we get in return. There is very little, if any, net energy. (The ratio of energy we get out to energy we put in is approximately 11 to 10). Plus, when looking for a silver-bullet, we generally don’t want something that competes directly with food, which will strangle supply and raise the costs of both food and fuel. But, of course, farmers have a lobby, so let the money talk! Onward with corn-based ethanol!

Cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels (biodiesal, methanol, butanol, etc) show far more promise. And they have many sources that don’t compete with food; for example, biodiesel can be made from algae or switchgrass that grows on land unsuitable for growing food crops. None of those has a big lobby, however.

On foreign policy, you stated again that we are always on the side of democracy and freedom. So, why do we still support the regime in Saudi Arabia? Oh yeah, they have oil. You talked about success in Afghanistan, but didn’t mention that since we took our eye off the ball there, concentrating our resources in Iraq, the Taliban has made a resurgence. On Iraq, you again tried confusing American by talking about Al Qaeda in Iraq as if that’s the reason we went in. One more time, for the benefit of morons so fucking braindead that they actually still believe you: Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the fall of Saddam; they’re in there now. In fact, Saddam and Osama Bin Laden were enemies, because Saddam was far too secular for Bin Laden’s taste. Once again, Saddam was secular and hated the theocrats. They were enemies, not friends. We helped Al Qaeda by overthrowing Saddam. You see they’re both evil, and the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. Sometimes, they’re both our enemies. You Republicans can’t seem to get that through your head.

And you continued beating the drums of war on Iran. Awesome! Let’s have more dead and wounded troops, more dead and wounded innocent civilians, more hundreds of billions of dollars on our national platinum card, further damage to our nation’s image in the eyes of the global community. And, don’t forget to ask nothing from the rest of us!

That’s our Bush: “War for the soldiers, tax cuts for the rest of us!”

Iraq War: Shifting Rationales.

Dear President Bush:

We anti-war people were completely wrong, huh? Yes, we were wrong when we said that he had no WMD. And we were way off the mark when we said that invading Iraq would result in a civil war between the Shiites and Sunnis. And boy did we screw up when we said that the Iraq war would drain the resources needed to fight the actual terrorists. And it would create more terrorists, doing more harm than good. And the occupation would be a nightmare. And the Shiites don’t want democracy; they want an Islamic theocracy in the mold of Iran. Etc. Man, we really should be more careful next time.

Before I get to the current war in Iraq, I want to mention one thing that the media never mention. The REPUBLICAN PARTY, under Ronald Reagan, SUPPORTED SADDAM HUSSEIN, IN 1983, AGAINST IRAN. Sorry, I had to get that off of my chest. The MSM never see the need to point out your hypocrisy.

So, was Saddam Hussein a nice, pleasant fellow when he was our ally in the early 1980’s, when Ronald Reagan and Donald Rumsfeld armed him against our common enemy, Iran? I’m wondering, because many of the things that Bush has in recent years said about Hussein – torturing Iraqi citizens, invading neighbors, gassing people – are absolutely true; however, we already knew about them in 1983, when Rumsfeld, smiling, shook good’ole Saddam’s hand.

I'll write quite a few entries regarding the war in Iraq. This is just my first. In this post, I want to focus on your shifting rationales -- i.e. lying -- for war with Iraq. Your reasons for war evolved over time. At first, you just wanted to link Saddam with Osama bin Laden and 9/11. This is pretty funny, because you were counting on us to have amnesia. Do you remember why Saddam was our ally? Yes, because he was a secular leader, which is why bin Laden hated him. That’s right, they were actually enemies, Saddam and Osama, that is, and yet you wanted to make them out to be allies. Clever.

After that had been disproved, you stopped saying, directly, that Saddam and Al Qaeda were in cahoots to destroy America together. You were too smart for that. You would say something like, “Now Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, just like Al Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11, and Saddam Hussein may give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11, so that Al Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11, may have weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, so when they, Al Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11, attack us again, like they did on 9/11, they will have weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, to carry out their 9/11-style attack on us, and the next 9/11 attack from Al Qaeda, who attacked us on the first 9/11, will be carried out using weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein. Now rather than seeing a mushroom cloud, let’s invade Iraq.”

It’s pretty impressive how you would link the two without really linking the two. (And some people say you’re not smart.) You would carefully choose your words so that no one could accuse of lying, but you were obviously trying to be deceptive.

So your next justification for war, proceeding directly from your first justification, was Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, which could be seen by your administration and absolutely no one else. I hate it when that happens. You know, when I was six, I had a friend named “Fuffles” who came from the planet Plupiter through my closet door to give me magic twinkies! But no one could see him but me!

So where are the weapons of mass destruction? That’s right: they weren’t there. Thus, you moved on to different rationales, as reported by Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post. On August 1, 2003, they wrote:

As the search for illegal weapons in Iraq continues without success, the Bush administration has moved to emphasize a different rationale for the war against Saddam Hussein: using Iraq as the 'linchpin' to transform the Middle East and thereby reduce the terrorist threat to the United States. President Bush, who has mostly stopped talking about Iraq's weapons, said at a news conference Wednesday that 'the rise of a free and peaceful Iraq is critical to the stability of the Middle East, and a stable Middle East is critical to the security of the American people' (Milbank & Allen, 2003).

The article continues, quoting several members of your administration basically saying, in slightly different words, that the regime change in Iraq will serve as a catalyst for change in the middle east, a lighting rod that will spread democracy throughout the region like a wildfire. Suddenly, every Muslim, middle-eastern nation will embrace human rights, political and religious freedoms and free elections. It’s some nice talk. However, aside from being roughly your third explanation for the necessity of war in Iraq, it’s also a bunch of crap. You know as well as anyone that this was an impossible dream. It simply was not going to happen.

Milton Viorst stated in the LA Times in 2003: “Iraq's Shiites, 60% of the population, most of them fervently religious, have stunned U.S. officials who gave us the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Not only do they reject our occupation, but they also dismiss the Western-style democracy that we were assured they would welcome” (Viorst, 2003).

Viorst argued then, and it has been proven since, that the majority of people in Iraq simply do not want a democracy; they crave an Islamic theocracy. Toppling Hussein – as evil a despot as he was – has ironically helped the Islamic theocrats, and thus the terrorists (Viorst, 2003).

This rationale evolved into the “liberating the Iraqi people” defense, and I have a few comments on this as well. First of all, this is so Wilsonian. I thought you Republicans were against nation-building; yet here we are, invading a sovereign nation in order to bring them democracy. In the process we will spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding their infrastructure. I think I get it; you’re only against nation-building for nations without oil under their feet, right?

The Iraqis obviously don’t want us in their country, but we continue to spill American blood on Iraqi desserts, and continue to bleed our taxpayers’ money, on “liberating the Iraqi people.” My mind is numb trying to figure out how roughly 30% of the US population still believes you.

If this were true, and if we really are justified in invading Iraq because of our goal of “liberating them,” why wouldn’t we go through the UN? That’s a question I have. You argued that the “pre-emptive,” unilateral attack – in defiance of the UN – was necessary because Saddam was a direct threat to us. That premise was shot down like my pick-up lines at singles bars. So, if he wasn’t a direct threat to our nation, why couldn’t we go through the UN at that point? Why do we need to “pre-emptively,” unilaterally, “liberate” people who don’t like us, from a tyrant that we once supported, and then try to create stability among people who hate each other and hate us simultaneously. What, exactly, is wrong with you?

Sources

Allen, M., & Milbank, D. (2003, August 1). U.S. shifts rhetoric on its goals in Iraq. Washingon Post.
Viorst, M. (2003, May 25). Why they don’t want Democracy. The Los Angeles Times.

Introduction

Do you have something you want to say to President George W. Bush? So do I. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could have five minutes to tell him what an ignorant, evil, incompetent, miserable failure he is. And that is the purpose of this blog. I encourage you to join in the fun!

Now, I don’t think he’ll actually read this blog, which is par for the course since he doesn’t actually read anything. However, I do believe it’ll make us feel better and decrease the necessity of therapy or prescription medication that we may need to accept the harsh reality of the unmitigated disaster that has been the Bush presidency. And it doesn’t have to be just Bush; go ahead and write letters to anyone in his administration, or any political ally, for that matter. I’ll begin.

Dear President Bush:

You haven’t fooled me. I see right through your smirk, you know, the one you wear every time you’re lying. It’s funny that approximately 30% of the people have yet to see that. Yes, you can fool that 30% all of the time, and you can fool 90% some of the time (such as September of 2001), but “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” That’s your harsh reality, Sir. And your legacy will be this:

• An unnecessary, unjust, immoral and illegal war based on incorrect intelligence at best, and outright lies at worst
• Gross incompetence in handling that war
• Rampant corruption and cronyism
• $3 trillion added to that national debt in seven years, the vast majority coming in the first six years, with a “fiscally conservative” (say that with straight face) Republican congress
• Soaring trade deficits, hitting $763.3 billion in 2006
• A severely weakened dollar
• A health care crisis you did nothing about – sky-rocketing costs leaving 47 million uninsured, millions more under insured and even fully insured middle class families in dire straights in the event of serious medical problems
• An energy crisis you did nothing about – especially the continued reliance on oil, the rapidly escalating costs of which are tricking throughout the economy
• Failed educational policy
• A severely degraded environment, jeopardizing the ecological sustainability necessary for future prosperity

I’m not sure if a worse president is even theoretically, let alone practically, possible.