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Family and Friends is my everyday journal. Captain's Log is where I pontificate on religion and politics.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Soapbox

Just read a Yahoo news story where they've put a price tag on all the ideas John Edwards is floating while on the Presidentail campaign. If he gets what he's asking for it will cost $125 Billion a year. Wow that's a pretty big number so what is it he's going to be spending this money on?
  • Universal health care
  • Lowering engery costs
  • College scholarship program
  • reducing poverty levels

Now how is he going to pay for all this:

He would get rid of the tax cuts Bushco has given to all those making 200 grand or more a year. He would save money for medicair by negotiating lower drug prices. Stop paying the kickbacks to the banks financing student loans, who are quadrupling or more the interest rates on those who miss a single payment.

The Republican response is to label this TAX AND SPEND. And if elected to two terms it would come to a TRILLION DOLLARS.

Well we've had seven years going on eight years of TAX CUT AND SPEND LIKE CRAZY from the Republicans, and what has it got us?

  • Nearly four thousand American soldiers dead and counting
  • 25,000 wounded and counting
  • Hundreds of thousands with mental and pychological disorders that will last for decades.
  • Two countries in ruins with no resolution is sight.
  • The destruction and failure to rebuild a major American City, but Florida is in fine shape.
  • Runaway fuel prices with no end in sight.
  • A medical care crisis killing children whose parents can't afford to pay for a dentist, but a brain dead woman merits an emergency session of Congress and legal bills mounting into the millions.
  • College students becoming indentured servants to their student loan banks who are gouging the governemnt at the same time.

The total cost when all is said and done for Dubbya's eight years of mismanagement. WELL OVER A TRILLION DOLLARS. POSSIBLY TWO TRILLION DOLLARS.

Here's the kicker -- He's not paying for it. The tax cuts are too important for sound fiscal responsibility, or pay as you go. These two wars are being added to the National debt, to be paid for by the next three or four generations of taxpayers.

ARE WE GETTING OUR MONEY'S WORTH?

5 comments:

OkieLawyer said...

You tell 'em, Patrick!

By the way, on the issue of health care, how much do we spend on it per year now? How much are students borrowing in student loans each year now?

If you add it up, it probably is in the hundreds of billions already. It really is a question of whose responsibility is it to provide education and health care. It is the argument between community vs. Social Darwinism.

P M Prescott said...

Agreed.
It's a matter of the public being served by tax dollars or corporations (which pay no taxes) being served by tax dollars.

BAC said...

Not to mention a national debt that went from zero to nearly 9 trillion in just six years. That's an all time record!! The interest alone on the debt is more each year than what Edwards is proposing ... and we don't get ANYTHING when that bill comes due.


BAC

P M Prescott said...

Very Good Points

OkieLawyer said...

bac:

The run-up of the national debt is partly a conservative strategy ("Starve the Beast") to prevent social programs from getting funded.

Although, not to be picky, it was the deficit that was zero, not the debt itself. However, the debt was beginning to get paid down by the end of Bill Clinton's term.