As I write, Barack Obama will deliver a "major economic address." In it, he'll basically pitch his stimulus package -- which is reported to come in at $775 billion over two years. The problem is that we don't have it. In fact, just Tuesday, Obama warned that we're going to be dealing with deficits for some time.
Politico:
President-elect Barack Obama said Tuesday that $1 trillion deficits could last for “years to come” as he sought to make the case for budget reforms amid an economy in peril.
Obama’s warning came as he met for the second consecutive day in Washington with his top economic officials, this time in a session devoted to fixing the budget process.
“Peter Orszag now forecasts that, at the current course and speed, a trillion-dollar deficit will be here before we even start the next budget,” Obama said, alluding to his nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget.
The president-elect suggested that such 13-figure deficits could last “for years to come, even with the economic recovery that we are working on at this point.”
The problem, of course, is that George W. Bush has spent money like a drunk in a strip club for the past eight years. And, like that drunk stuffing bills into a stripper's G-string, he really doesn't have anything to show for it. Defenders of Bush's bender will point to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, to the "Global War on Terror," and to events like 9/11. This spending, they'd argue, was forced upon poor George.
But that's not extremely true. With the exception of Katrina, all of these expenses were avoidable. Iraq is a war of choice, not necessity, and there's a very good argument to be made that 9/11 was Bush's fault. Attorney General John Ashcroft once threatened to fire the next person who wasted his time with terrorism, for example. Fighting porn was the Justice Department's big project. 9/11 happened because no one in the Bush administration took terrorism seriously... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
