Presidential Follies

I read the other day that every baby born now has a $150,000.00 bill to pay, complements of the defecit spending of our oligarchy. You can read the whole article A Glide Path to Ruin byline: Kristoff in the June 26 New York Times.

Here's the relevant quote:

"President Bush has excoriated the "death tax," as he calls the estate tax. But his profligacy will leave every American child facing a "birth tax" of about $150,000.

That's right: every American child arrives owing that much, partly to babies in China and Japan. No wonder babies cry. "

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Now, I love technology, I just think that the people in charge should think of what they are doing, and put some money into real progress, and real training; before we end up a third world country, with a third world mindset and a third rate economy.

Actually, Our President did a lot of talking about job training to replace the jobs lost in the first two years of his presidency. He hasn't been talking about it much lately, because there are no new job training programs, only cuts to existing programs.

The 300 billion dollars that he spent on the war ( a war that he started because he wanted to, not because Iraq had anything to do with terrorism or 9/11 or WMD ) COULD have been spent on building plants to turn crop waste to ethanol - one expert estimates that if we did that to all crop waste, it would create enough diesel fuel to free us of foreign oil.

It COULD have been spent to build electric trunk lines to the parts of the country that have abundant solar and wind energy available. I have stood on the plains of Oklahoma, where the winds blow & blow & never stop. A wind expert estimated that we have enough renewable energy in the wind on the Great Plains to rival what the Saudis pump out of the ground every year.

I have stood in the desert under the blue skies of New Mexico, and Arizona, and California's Mojave Desert, and there are hundreds of square miles of (mostly) empty sand that could have renewable solar energy extracted to power the whole southwest. We need the cables laid & the panels set.

We have coal deposits that will last many years, to generate electricity. We just need the stacks cleaned up, the smoke scrubbed from the exhaust. Part of that 300 billion dollars COULD have gone to really clean the skies of our northeast corridor.

Instead of all these forward looking, industry building, job creating technologies, our president chooses to throw billions of dollars at the oil industry, to squabble over the dregs and tatters of a dying, death-dealing resource. He chooses to throw money at an industry that had the most profitable year in it’s history last year, with BILLIONS in profit.

He chooses to throw billions at a horrendously polluting nuclear industry, one that has so much radioactive waste in dumps around the country right now that our scientists do not know what to do with it, as it is. The cleanup will be expensive and dangerous.




The Gypsy thinks he should not be permitted to play with toys he cannot even pronounce the name of.