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

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (496012)	11/20/2003 1:03:13 PM
From: JakeStraw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

So please explain to the thread the inheritance law currently.

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (496012)	11/20/2003 1:04:06 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Editorial: Spend now, pay when? Medicare, energy bills break the bank Bee Editorial Staff Published 2:15 a.m. PST Thursday, November 20, 2003 Once upon a time, if a Democrat told a Republican that the federal government needed to institute a big new spending program to deal with some pressing social problem, the response would be a steely glare and a pointed question: And how exactly do you propose to pay for that, Mr. Liberal? No more. On the evidence of the expensive energy and Medicare prescription drug bills that Republicans have written and are poised, with President Bush's enthusiastic support, to push through Congress, the Republican Party has gone through the political equivalent of a sex change operation. Donning the garb of the Democrats they once berated, Republicans have become the party of spend now, pay someday. The Medicare bill, according to estimates, will cost around $400 billion over the next 10 years. The money will be used to buy drugs for participating seniors, and raise payments to doctors and premiums to Medicare HMOs. Is a drug benefit to older households, the wealthiest segment of the population, the highest priority for federal dollars? There are good arguments on both sides of that question. But there is no good argument for putting the benefit on the national credit card. Yet that is exactly what the Republican Medicare bill proposes. The same is true for the misshapen energy bill. Hatched in private by Republican conferees, the bill, dubbed the "leave no lobbyist behind" act by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., offers up $100 billion worth of subsidies, loan guarantees, grants and tax breaks to firms and farmers without providing any discernible benefit to the public. Congressional Republicans and Bush would put the cost of that on the credit card, too. Yet almost no one is asking how all this will eventually get paid for. Why not? The national credit card, if you haven't noticed, is tapped out. The Bush tax cuts have pushed the annual federal deficit to around $500 billion, the highest ever. All projections show the red ink continuing throughout the decade. And then things get worse, as the baby boomers retire and Medicare and Social Security outlays soar. The mostly unspoken reality of the week is that Republicans in Congress are bundling up nearly half a trillion of this decade's wants and sending the bill to a future decade already encumbered with the fiscal pressures that will come with an aging society. There used to be a political party that would stand against such shortsighted action. It advanced the wisdom that wanting something carried with it the moral obligation to pay for it. Too bad for America's future that we don't have such a party today. - Get the whole story every