Amazon.com Widgets

As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Tap Dancing As Fast As They Can

Great news everyone! Every man, woman and child in the country is only down a thousand dollars now in the latest budget!

Today, the Office of Management Budget projected a $296 billion federal deficit for fiscal year 2006. Bush held a press conference arguing that this is a vindication of his economic policies.

Actually, it would be the fourth largest deficit of all time. Here’s the top five:

1. 2004 (George W. Bush) $413 billion
2. 2003 (George W. Bush) $378 billion
3. 2005 (George W. Bush) $318 billion
4. 2006 (George W. Bush) $296 billion (projected)
5. 1992 (George H. W. Bush) $290 billion


I don't think people recognize the difference between the budget deficit and the national debt, and they're certainly not getting any help from the media. The budget deficit represents current acounts for the fiscal year, whereas the national debt reflects money owed by the government to banks or lending institutions or other foreign nations. That's running at about eight trillion dollars, which is $28,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Yesterday it got $1.7 billion dollars bigger. Today it will again.

Incidentally, we're supposed to celebrate this.

We're also supposed to celebrate the fact that detainees at Guantanamo and other US prison sites will be entitled to full Geneva convention protections. This of course represents a shift in policy, which said earlier that enemy combatants did not fly under a foreign flag and were not subject to Geneva. Which means that this statement presupposes that we were at some point not giving those protections to detainees. So we're supposed to celebrate that we're NOT torturing people anymore.

Yay.

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