The deficit

The financial cost of what Bush is doing to the country is really huge. It's also terrifying. Today I want to share with you an article entitled, "The Cost of Bush Will Be Huge, Lasting" and it's by Dave Zweifel. Here's the core of what it says:

A front page of USA Today last week showed it all in graphic detail. If we continue on the same track we are today, our annual $319 billion deficit will be more than $4 trillion in 2050, when our grandkids are nearing retirement.

"We face a demographic tsunami," insists David Walker, the U.S. comptroller general. He compares the United States to Rome before the fall of the empire. The country faces deficits in its budget, its balance of payments, its savings and its leadership, he told USA Today.

And he's far from alone. Both conservative and liberal economic experts are starting to sound the alarm. We can't keep spending on everything from an incredibly expensive war to a Medicare drug program that mainly benefits insurance companies and cut taxes by hundreds of billions at the same time.

As Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, wrote in the Chicago Tribune last week:

For too long, the philosophy in Washington has been that you can spend without consequence or sacrifice. That we can fight a war in Iraq and a war on terror, protect our homeland, provide our citizens with Medicare and Social Security and maintain our domestic priorities, all while cutting taxes for the wealthy and funding every local project there is.

It's not a sustainable future for America, he added.

Now we have Alan Greenspan lumping the country's record trade deficit on top of all our other problems.

There's going to come a time - perhaps earlier than we realize - that foreign lenders are going to stop funding that deficit we keep growing.

And to think: we started out with a surplus at the beginning of the Bush administration. But this deficit is what the so-called conservatives want so that they can cut every social program that provides the safety for ordinary Americans.