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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (222654)	1/28/2002 12:48:14 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 769670

I will need to be brief right now since it is late. The most obvious sign of "Poisoning the Well" is the large deficits. These are clearly designed to ensure that new government programs cannot be proposed in the future because pretty much all the tax money will be going to pay interest payments. I know that Bush, and Fox news, and the filth spewing pundits of this thread all say that the deficits are somehow Clinton's fault or Bin Laden's fault. Lets talk some simple common sense. If the government was in an arrangement where it is taking in as much money as it spends then it's current deficit is in balance. There is approximately X dollars coming in and X dollars being spent. Now if the number of dollars coming in is sharply and dramaticly cut, moreover if money that has already come in is sent back then you get some X-$ in with the same X out. The result is a deficit. It's valid for Bush to have an opinion on how big X should be and to implement policies to get taxes and expenses to the level that he and his party think appropriate. What they have done instead is to continue to raise the percentage of dollars that the government has to pay on interest payments thereby crippling the ability to offer any programs later, even in later administrations. In effect, he has set the country on an untried course where it will try to be a big superpower with a small central government AND he has rigged it so that even if it doesn't work there is no way to try something else (and I strongly suggest it will not work so we can start practicing our British-like longing for the old days). A simpler example to understand (but somewhat less important for our total future) is his program to have cut some of the last remaining stands of trees in the forest system which have never been cut. These are complex and very old ecosystems which we do not fully understand. It isn't smart to cut them down recklessly. Why do I say Recklessly? Because it's not commercially feasible to harvest these trees since they are in the middle of nowhere (which is why nobody went after them before) and the price of lumber is quite cheap. The Bush plan is to raise tarrifs on lumber from Canada to get the price to rise enough that a company could turn a profit cutting these forests if and only if the federal government builds roads to these middle of nowhere wilderneses. That goes beyond reckless, it's just plain stupid. These are decisions that once made cannot be undone in a thousand years, you just don't grow stands of 600 year old trees quickly. TP