Scary Stuff
Now that we’ve officially overdosed on Sarah Palin fantasies, it’s time to return to the cold hard world of cold hard cash - and specifically, how neither major presidential campaign has anything resembling a plan to manage it.
The unpopular, little-publicized truth is that America’s financial straights worsened significantly yesterday when the Congressional Budget Office projected a federal deficit of $407 billion for the year. Of course, that’s before you count the $83 billion Congress will spend to adjust the alternative minimum tax and the $100 billion it will shell out (initially) to keep mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac afloat.
Rarely ones to live up to their “truth to power” tagline, we’ve got to give it up for McClatchy for boiling it down fairly succinctly on this one:
Mammoth federal-budget deficits feed inflation, make America dependent on foreign lenders, cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments on the growing national debt and drain capital savings from more productive investments.
True that. McClatchy writers David Lightman and Kevin G. Hall also did a surprisingly good job of explaining how neither John McCain nor Barack Obama seems to grasp the math necessary to fix our soaring deficits and soon-to-be ten trillion dollar debt:
Republican nominee McCain has promised to balance the budget by 2013, but most analysts consider that goal elusive unless lawmakers make radical changes in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid funding. McCain has made no such dramatic proposals.
Obama issued a statement Tuesday on the new data, promising that he’d “bring real change by cutting taxes for middle-class families and small businesses, paying for all his proposals to reduce the deficit” and working toward fiscal responsibility. He’d let tax cuts for the wealthiest earners expire and would impose higher taxes on certain corporations.
We’ve written on McCain’s budget-balancing myth and Obama’s expensiveness in the past, but it’s always nice to see the MSM so pointedly call out both presidential candidates like this.
Sure, Sarah Palin’s got great stems, but that doesn’t change the fact that her boss doesn’t have a plan to ween this country off of the unsustainable spending that’s bankrupting it a little more every single day …
Comments
By Money talks and BS walks on September 10th, 2008 at 11:15 am
What a refershing news story !!! Finally -the MSM is saying we are going broke and McCain and Obama could care less. It is a sad sad state of affairs to watch our once great country go into bankruptcy and our two major party candidates propose nothing but bigger government and a downward spiral into deficit financed socialism .
Let’s not be distracted by moose hunting and lipstick.
Our two-party system offers no real choice. The only goal of this election season is to stop people from considering the real issues.
Vote 3rd party this election and send a message we have had enough .
By Nick on September 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Amen to the article and the above comment. Ron Paul had a nice press conference just now….imploring all to vote 3rd party. Because of the “sore loser” laws here in the state(currently being challenged by the ACLU) you can’t write in a candidate that’s lost in the primary process….but that doesn’t stop us from voting essentially “none of the above” by voting 3rd party. There is very little that seperates the two corrupt parties anymore.
RP made a great point in his opening speech….if you look at the election numbers, they don’t really represent the majority in the nation. 32% of the population voted in the last election for one of the two major parties…with one winner that means around 16% of the population actually voted for the president….WHAT A JOKE. If you account for the disaffected/non voters and 3rd party voters they constitute a HUGE majority… the two party stranglehold/monopoly on our electoral process could easily be broken if simply half of the “other” potential voting population voted 3rd party.
Interesting times folks…maybe the oncoming fiscal disaster will be the breeding ground for a return to what made our country great…the question is whether we’ll have to go through decades of improverishment before getting there.(FDR style of course….like the current nationalization of Freddie/Fannie and ongoing corporate & social welfare statism)
By The 2-Party System Does Not Work ANYMORE on September 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Ron Paul has a plan. But it won’t be pleasant — like taking really foul medicine. Neither Obama nor McCain have the mettle to do what is necessary.
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