Ann Shibler
JBS
March 22, 2008

The House fiscal 2009 budget, which passed last week, raises the borrowing authority of the United States from $9.815 trillion to $10.2 trillion, an increase of $385 billion dollars. The Senate, passing its own version of the 2009 budget, did not raise the federal borrowing authority, but does expect to spend $3 trillion, with a projected deficit from $340 to $366 billion. Some estimate that the Treasury Department will hit the $9.815 ceiling limit shortly after the November elections, which will be no surprise to anyone. The two chambers will have to reach a compromise in the next few weeks.

The big winners in all of this are the foreign entities the U.S. will borrow from in an effort to finance the expenditures. Other winners are the recipients of the king’s ransom of funding. These include the “war on terror,” with the Defense budget rising about 7 percent to $515 billion, and the Homeland Security budget that is rising by almost 11 percent. There are also plans to double the State Department’s size by adding 1,100 new diplomats along with the accompanying bureaucracy and “diplomatic expenditures.”

“It’s a good budget,” President Bush chirped back in February. “It’s a budget that achieves some important objectives. One, it understands our top priority is to defend our country, so we fund our military as well as fund the homeland security.”

Well, it does indeed achieve some important objectives, one being the economic collapse of this country, which furthers the power and control of the state. An economic collapse, like a war, is usually met with calls for greater government effort. In either case, when that happens, government gets bigger and more intrusive. Economic collapse, like war, is the health of the state. And increasing the reach of the state is something the Bush administration has been pursuing over two terms in office.

For all those who voted for Bush — twice — Rep. John M. Spratt, Jr. (D-S.C.) pointed out, “When President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.7 trillion. Today it is $9.2 trillion and rising, projected to increase to $9.7 trillion by the time President Bush leaves office — up by $4 trillion in eight years. This is the legacy our children and grandchildren will inherit from the fiscal policy of this administration.”

Whoever is elected to the White House in November will inherit an economic meltdown, but it doesn’t really matter, as the media-elected main candidates wouldn’t change any of the policies of the Bush administration anyway. In fact, they may become far worse. And don’t look to the democrats in the House and Senate to put up more than a whisper in protest.

Instead, it falls to the American people to dictate the course the nation will take by electing well-informed constitutionalists to office to replace the assorted “compassionate conservatives” and outright socialists who, being in office now, are driving the nation into the ground.