Vee Jay sent us some quotes from a nytimes.com article about, Mr. Bush's Fiscal Gaffe. Seems she had gotten all steamed up about Bush -- again. But hey, it wasn't his gaffe, it was his plan. Fiscal responsibility? Fed operating in the black? Pay off the national debt? Everybody knows the Bush agenda is aimed at the converse of each of these.

"No sooner had George W. Bush become president than he began warning of an impending recession and campaigning for a huge tax cut. But he forgot — or perhaps did not know — that a slowing economy, with lower corporate profits and personal earnings, would automatically result in lower tax collections and throw his knife-edged fiscal plan into imbalance. So instead of residing peacefully in "lockboxes" for the next decade, the trust funds collected to cover baby boomers' Social Security and Medicare benefits may be tapped as early as this year. Mr. Bush gave up long-term fiscal discipline for short-term political gain, and the salad days of surpluses have transmogrified into the bad old days of budget bickering."

Bush didn't forget anything. You are looking at the Bush plan in action.

"It all began in January. With a decade of budget surpluses ahead, Mr. Bush swore he could deliver a trillion-dollar tax cut while erasing the national debt and leaving the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare untouched for 10 years."

Nobody but nobody believed that. But, you know what, jelly bean? They let him do it to us anyway.

"But after Congress set its spending levels and passed Mr. Bush's tax cut, less than $10 billion worth of leeway was left in this year's budget before the government would have to pry open the lockboxes. Now, thanks to shrinking income tax revenues, that narrow margin of error is about to disappear."

Make that has disappeared.

"In August the Congressional Budget Office will probably adjust its estimates of this year's corporate tax collections downward for the second time in four months. Senator Kent Conrad, the new chairman of the Budget Committee, believes that the Budget Office will find this revenue estimate $23 billion lower. Since so little of the surplus was left, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds will have to shore up the shortfall."

She said the article said that this is all, "reminiscent of the 1980's, when Democrats in Congress blamed Ronald Reagan's tax cuts and defense buildup for the nation's vast deficits while the president blamed Congress for profligate spending on entitlement programs. The ballooning deficits of those days, however, will be dwarfed by the ones that arrive when Social Security and Medicare go into the red. Delving into their trust funds now would bring that financial crisis, usually assumed to be a decade away, several years closer."

Vee Jay said we could read the article at:
nytimes.com
But guess what jelly bean? We won't need to. Because everybody knew he was going to do it. And we told you so.

Bush jr. has guaranteed us all a more costly future. But, hey. Why worry? Be happy. We told you so. We told you so. We told you so. We told you so. We told you so.

Finally someone got this one right. Vee Jay sent us a reprint emailing from the Washington Post:

It's Not Reform, It's Deception By Robert J. Samuelson "Washington think" is less about logic than political hustle. If you favor something, you attach it to a popular cause -- say, homeland security. If you oppose something, you attach it to an unpopular cause -- say, Enron. Bear this in mind as the House debates the Shays-Meehan "campaign finance reform" bill, named after sponsors Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin Meehan (D-Mass.). The Enron scandal (it's said) demonstrates the corruptness of big political contributions and the need for an overhaul. The argument, though highly seductive, is complete make-believe....
Read it at:
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1997-2002Feb12.html

Vee Jay likes The Washington Post and The New York Times.

"Pangloss avowed that he had undergone dreadful sufferings; but having once maintained that everything went on as well as possible, he still maintained it, and at the same time believed nothing of it." - Candide, Chapter 30-Conclusion, Voltaire.
literature.org/authors/voltaire/candide/chapter-30.html

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" ~ H.L. Mencken