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

To: Dan B. who wrote (471675)	10/6/2003 12:11:34 AM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Bush's tax cuts shift the burden to the middleclass by several percentage points. Those percentage points are worth hundreds of billions over the long term. It isn't right, fair or honest.

To: Dan B. who wrote (471675)	10/6/2003 12:59:32 AM
From: Orcastraiter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Think of this, 40% of the tax cut went to the richest 1% of tax payers. This is huge. At the same time bush as increased spending and increased the deficit. His increased military and war spending will be targeted at a small sector of American business. Focusing profits for these contractors and business. The margins for defense contractors are huge. These industries have time and time again been shown to be the most inefficient in terms of what is gained. Bush is asking for $60 billion for the troops in Iraq. Now look I'm all in favor of our fighting men and women get what they need but lets look at the numbers here. We have less than 150,000 troops there. $60 billion is $400,000 each. I read that the additional money is for flack jackets and armored Humvees. But for $400,000 grand, each soldier can have 7 flack jackets and their own personal armored Hummvee. Another $27 Billion is for infrastructure improvements in Iraq. They are already talking about a $50 billion shortfall. The point I'm trying to make is that this is money $87 + $50 billion will be focused on a small sector of the economy. Mainly the defense sector. That benefit will not be seen widely in the US. That same amount of money spread around the country on needed infrastructure improvements would stimulate the entire country. The ripple effects would get the economy moving again stimulate growth and there fore increase the taxes coming to the treasury. This argument presupposes that maybe we shouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq. But since we did, it will be very difficult to cut and run. But that does not mean that we have to have a pork barrel party for a few companies. The proposed spending in Iraq is gold plated, and the profits will be huge for a very few. We could do a lot better than that by letting the Iraqis rebuild their own country with the assistance of the US and the UN. As far as fighting the war on terror, this war in Iraq was independent of the war on terror. We were fighting bin Laden, then suddenly we make a left turn into Iraq. I do believe that we should help Iraq now too. But we should be helping Iraq to help themselves. We should be involving the UN. Bush has everyone pissed off. And they will likely not be helping as much as we would like now. I can't summarize this in a few paragraphs because it's too complex for that. But ask yourself this question: What's in this $87 billion for the American People? The answer is not much. We get little or no investment in our own country and the people get a huge bill that will take generations to pay off, while a select few make enormous profits. If you are in favor of policies like this you're probably not a libertarian. You're probably a neoconservative hawk. And your dad probably has stock in Carlyle or Haliburton corporations and or sits on the board of directors. Orca