Running on empty

This is unbelievable. How can this be getting so little attention? We are literally running on empty. What the hell has happened to the Republicans? Fiscal responsibility used to be their clarion call, but they have completely abandoned all reason. On top of the higher debt cieling, Bush and his crime family want to make the tax cuts permanent, privatize social security and they need another $70 billion for Iraq!!!

From the Center for American Progress:

Conservatives waited until after the election was over to breach the country's debt ceiling. Although the country actually reached $7.4 trillion in debt in early October, Treasury Secretary John Snow employed a host of accounting tricks to technically avoid breaching the limit. One trick even including suspending investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. Snow's moves were directly designed to prevent conservatives in the House from having to vote on such a politically sensitive matter in the weeks before the election.

From today's NY Times:

The bill, if approved by the House in a vote expected on Thursday, would authorize the third big increase in the federal borrowing since President Bush took office in 2001. Federal debt has ballooned by $1.4 trillion over the past four years, to $7.4 trillion, and the new ceiling would allow borrowing to reach $8.2 trillion.

With no end in sight to the huge annual budget deficits, which hit a record of $412 billion this year, lawmakers predicted on Wednesday that the new ceiling would probably have to be raised again in about a year.

But what does all this mean? Our debt is not owned by Visa. It is owned by our trading partners, which puts us in a very awkward, un-American position. John Kerry had this to say on the Senate floor:

"To pay our bills, America now goes cup in hand to nations like China, Korea, Taiwan and Caribbean banking centers," Mr. Kerry said. "Those issues didn't go away on Nov. 3, no matter what the results."

In 2002, the Bush administration received a debt limit increase of $450 billion dollars. The next year the Treasury requested, and Congress delivered, a $984 billion dollar credit line, the largest in history. That amount exceeded "all of the debt inherited by President Ronald Reagan, which was all of the debt accumulated from Bunker Hill [1776] to 1981." The Bush administration and its conservative allies have blown through nearly a trillion dollars in just 18 months.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, if President Bush succeeds in passing his 2005 budget – which includes an extension of expiring tax cuts – the government will rack up about $6.2 trillion in additional debt between now and 2014, nearly doubling our current debt ($7.38 trillion) for a total of $14.5 trillion.

Interest payments on the mounting debt, which exceeded $321 billion in fiscal year 2004, also squeezes out funding for other priorities like education and health care.