Why the State of US Politics is Extremely Depressing
Get the picture: the federal budget deficit and long-term national debt are spiraling out of control, threatening not only vital public services and the solvency of our retirement system, but the stability of our economy, increasingly in hock to foreign governments. House and Senate Republicans are deeply divided, once again, on a congressional budget resolution for next year. We're fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, and aside from the human costs borne by brave Americans serving their country, the financial costs are rising steadily, and have not been factored into the official budget deficit estimates.Link.
There are a whole host of pressing national challenges that need action, from rapidly increasing health care costs, to our increasing dependence on ever-more-expensive foreign oil, to a broken and increasingly corrupt political system, and on and on.
So what are the Republicans who run the U.S. House of Representatives planning to do tomorrow? Give the Paris Hiltons of this world not just another tax cut, but a complete free ride from taxation of the riches they never earned. It would almost be funny if it were not so serious a matter.
Specifically, the House is voting to make the total elimination of the federal inheritance tax, now scheduled to occur in 2010 and then vanish in 2011, permanent. This would boost the federal budget deficit by an estimated $290 billion through 2015; and by $745 billion through 2021. Add in the interest costs of borrowing the funds to pay for this measure, and the true ten-year cost is nearly $1 trillion.
Oy. While sometimes it is tempting to avoid politics and avoid all the petty partisanship, this sort of story shows how important a meaningful opposition party is. The question is-- is the current Democratic party meaningful opposiiton? There is hope, since this story is outrageous even to the "moderate" Democratic Leadership Council (this story is from their website).
posted by spooked at 11:46 PM
2 Comments:
did you hear about this?
from propaganda matrix -
"About 3 - 3 1/2 weeks ago, we became aware - because it was inserted in a movie - we became aware of some other footage of 9/11 that is not out here spreading around on any of the websites. You know, nobody has picked it apart. Nobody has analyzed it. And we finally found out where that video came from. We tracked down its producer. We tracked down the guy who shot it. We know exactly where he was standing when he shot it. And what got his attention was, of course, the impact on the north tower. He was filming that. And we are talking about some incredibly sharp TV quality video. When he zoomed in on the north tower, you can actually see five people jump out the windows where flames were leaping from those windows. You can actually tell what color slacks they were wearing, what color shirt - you know that type of imaging and that type of clarity. But he just happened to have kept his camera trained on that. He zoomed back out. All of a sudden, here comes streaking in that second plane that impacted the south tower.
When this plane is coming straight overhead in this new video, it is readily apparent that the only thing hanging under this plane anywhere are the two engines hanging under the wings. There is not a rocket pod of any form or fashion. There is something else - if you remember the one video that showed the plane as kind of a dark matte gray? Is it very clear in this image that this plane was very silver, very shiny, and the morning sunshine is glancing off of it. And it is definitely not as advertised. It makes me wonder now. There are two versions of that film. There is actually one version that is shot at 8 frames a second and then all of a sudden, it jumps to 12 frames a second. And then it goes back to 8 frames a second. Somebody has intentionally gone back in and spliced something."
I hadn't seen that. Thanks for the tip!
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