Boom - you're Fucked

Watch the umbrella closely...



... because your economy's going the same way

Almost Unnoticed, Bipartisan Budget Anxiety

By Dana Milbank
Post
Wednesday, May 18, 2005; A04

The timing could not have been more apt. On the eve of a titanic partisan
clash in the Senate, eggheads of the left and right got together yesterday
to warn both parties that they are ignoring the country's most pressing
problem: that the United States is turning into Argentina.

While Washington plunged into a procedural fight over a pair of judicial
nominees, Stuart Butler, head of domestic policy at the conservative
Heritage Foundation, and Isabel Sawhill, director of the left-leaning
Brookings Institution's economic studies program, sat down with Comptroller General David M. Walker to bemoan what they jointly called the budget "nightmare."

...

With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big
tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other
spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest
rates that collapsed Argentina's economy and caused riots in its streets a
few years ago.

"The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay
interest on massive and growing federal debt," Walker said. "The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina."

"All true," Sawhill, a budget official in the Clinton administration,
concurred. "To do nothing," Butler added, "would lead to deficits of the scale we've never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We've seen them in Argentina. That's a chilling thought, but it would mean that."

...

The unity of the bespectacled presenters was impressive -- and it made their conclusion all the more depressing. As Ron Haskins, a former Bush White House official and current Brookings scholar, said when introducing the thinkers: "If Heritage and Brookings agree on something, there must be
something to it."

...

But such haggling seems premature when both parties still deny the problem. "I don't think we're there yet," Walker said. "The American people have to understand where we are and where we're headed."

And where is that? "No republic in the history of the world lasted more than
300 years," Walker said. "Eventually, the crunch comes."

Daddy's friends bought George W Bush a company called Harken Oil, and he ran it into the ground. Then daddy's friends bought him another company called Arbusto, and he ran it into the ground. Then daddy's friends bought him the Texas Rangers and he inflated transfer fees so high, he ran baseball into the ground... Then daddy's friends bought him the United States of America.

As I wrote in a previous post: keep following the money... Because pretty soon there ain't gonna be much left.