Rick Raw: While You Were Out for The Holidays, $555 Billion Went Down The Drain

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Happy New Year suckers! While you were out enjoying the holidays, no one noticed that before our spendthrift Congressmen and Senators left for their holiday bacchanals, they passed a whopping $555 billion omnibus appropriations bill. It combined war funding with budgets for 14 Cabinet agencies. This bill not only sent the National Debt Clock clicking up at warp speed, it’s loaded with earmarks, (pork) granting Congressmen and Senators mad money for their pet projects. These are frivolous pork-barrel plans, such as, better grass on the golf courses in the lawmakers’ hometowns, or more fish in their favorite fishing holes. Really, earmarks are that trivial. Hey, it’s our money. Where’s our outrage? We should be going to see our legislators in droves, demanding change.

Ironically, in a Democratically controlled Congress, Decocrats caved, failing to win votes to force removal of U.S. troops or set a non-binding target to remove most troops by the end of next year. In other words, in an election year, Democrats were afraid that their constituents would accuse them of not supporting our troops and hurt the Democratic nominee for president.
Yes, if our useless representatives are not soliciting sex in men’s rooms, their hiding behind their desks like the sorry cowards we always knew they were. This was a pathetic year-end budget compromise deal between the Congress and the Bush administration ending months of empty rhetoric. When push came to shove, the Democrats lost their testicles and went home to their trophy wives.

Representative John Shadegg, R-Ariz, said, "Congress refuses to rein in its wasteful spending or curb its corruption!" And that’s coming from a Republican! The bill contained at least $48 billion in domestic spending above Bush’s budget. More significantly, Bush won his $70 billion in troop funding, while Republicans hid out in the basement. Both parties gave Bush carte blanch on war spending and they got their earmarks. Quid pro quo!

Hell, print more money. Its open season on the deficit. What’s worse, we have a whole year before Bush is out of office–a year for him send the National Debt Clock into inconceivable amounts of negative cash flow–presently its holding at over $9 trillion, but if this reckless spending continues, it may exceed $10 trillion by the end of the year.

Just imagine if Bush was running your family business as head of the firm and he was spending the company’s money with complete disregard for the financial health of the company, acquiring huge debts. You’d be doing the Mexican tap dance on the board’s conference table, demanding his resignation. Well, Bush is running our country like a drunk cowboy and we can’t fire him until next year. And, by that time, he will have sent the National Debt into deep space, well out of reach for the foreseeable future. Has anyone contemplated how much money $9 trillion dollars really is? It’s mind boggling.

After the bill passed, Democrats tried to spin it as a justified compromise, saying that the bill "smoothed the rough edges of Bush’s February budget plan," which sought below-inflation increases and contained cutbacks. Bull! The Democrats failure to throttle Bush’s war and domestic spending was a complete breakdown of leadership. It makes me lose faith that either party can act responsibly in such a charged political atmosphere when everyone is trying to cover their own asses rather than do the right thing. Yeah, 2008 is off to an expensive start.