Apologies are owed to drunken sailors everywhere. Never in a thousand years (or should we say a trillion, since that's the new baseline) could they have spent as wildly and irresponsibly as the current US Congress has. Our legislators have an unfair advantage, to be sure, since it's not their own money they're spending; that does tend to loosen the purse strings.
If you can, watch Sen. Jon Kyl's entire 13 minute speech, a devastating summary of the contents of the omnibus appropriations bill just passed by the House and now before the Senate. He will make you will long for responsible leadership. From the Washington Post:
One highlight from Sen. Kyl's speech, at 11:45 on the video:Each of the half-dozen measures is bigger than the one from the year before, and Republicans complained that Democrats are spending recklessly, given the growing federal budget deficit.
"There is no question that the era of big government has returned to Washington, D.C.," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (Calif.), the top Republican on the Appropriations panel. "I cannot and will not support this package of spending bills, because it simply spends too much money and makes a mockery of our legislative process."
I would suggest that President Obama and his White House officials and staff stop trying to blame President Bush for everything. If the President has been in office long enough to get the Nobel Peace Prize, presumably he's been in office long enough to do something about the public debt or unemployment. He's done something about it alright. Unemployment up from 7.6 percent to 10 percent, and the national debt from 10.6 trillion to 12 trillion dollars.
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3 comments:
Oh, that's rich. A republican complaining about runaway spending.
US National Debt on the day George W. Bush first took office:
$5.7 Trillion dollars.
US National Debt on the day George W. Bush left office:
$10.6 Trillion dollars.
Add to that - President Bush left his successor a deficit of $1.2 trillion dollars.
I'm not sure if conservatives can't count - or just can't remember their ideology presided over some of the most ruinous spending in modern times.
murph
Do you want to stop the madness? Or do you just want to waste your time on pointless sniping over who was more to blame this time of year somewhere in the sands of time?
Chris M:
I'm all for stopping the madness and solving our problems.
But your exasperation is better aimed at Sen. Kyl - and those who uncritically heap praise upon him. Sen. Kyl could roll up his sleeves and try to dig us out of the mess we find ourselves in. That would be useful - laudible even. Instead, he chooses to use his comically selective memory to try and fire up knee-jerk opposition to the majority.
Attacking the current administration for the national debt and unemployment does nothing to alleviate either problem.
Your suggestion that the all too-recent blunders of the Bush administration have vanished into the "sands of time" is baffling.
Sure, let's not dwell on the policies that got us here. What we should be doing is heaping abuse on the people trying to solve the collosal problems that resulted from those policies (which were authored and lustily supported by persons forever unknowable).
Give me a break.
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