Thank Goodness! For a moment there I had delusions that we were really in a pickle, that this recession talk was genuine, and that there was a need for belt tightening across the board.
“Dire times,” says our new President, “tough times,” says our brave Congress. They’re all set to put out grandchildren deep into debt to “stimulate” the economy — after they already pawned off the nation to offer solid kickbacks to the schmucks on Wall Street who made away like bandits while getting us into this mess in the first place.
But. This is a time of real Change We Can Believe In™, so when the going gets tough, we all pull together. Well… scratch that, actually. Because the Pentagon (the people who brought you Shock & Awe and Abu Ghraib) is not seeing any budget cuts at all. Quite the contrary; in addition to three years of 20 percent growth in budget up to 2008, they’re looking at an additional 8 percent for ’09, bringing the defense budget to a whopping $527 billion to spend on toys that go boom. This while state and local government are desperately slashing budgets trying to make ends meet. That’s really quite something to ponder, isn’t it? While the hypocrites in the GOP are nit picking over a few hundred million for family planning services in the stimulus package (Obama immediately caved when the prudes in the GOP said “no” to condoms), we’re set to match or exceed the $52 billion spent just on nuclear weapons in 2008.
That’s almost as much as the federal government spent on education in 2008 — but only almost. So we’re clearly smarter than all those smart bombs we’re building.
Aren’t we?
