Listening to all the nonsense spouted today about the President's budget, I began to wonder what the burnout rate is for the poor low-level staffers who have to produce it. Think about it. Year after year you work your tail off trying to fit square pegs (Iraq won't cost a dime past 2009!) into the round holes of reality, and you've got to know your projections are nonsense. It must get really tiresome after a while.
As for the OMB director himself, when he stands up and presents this $2.9 trillion monstrosity which cuts federal programs everywhere else in order to pay for the military and the border patrol, do you think he can stand to look himself in the eye in his mirror when he gets home?
We know the Alternative Minimum Tax is biting deeper and deeper into the middle class and at some point that group is going to stand up and say "no more!", but is there any provision for reducing the amount of revenue it's expected to produce? Nah. Similarly, the Senate is not going to allow $101 billion to be cut from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years by reducing payments to docs and hospitals and by means-testing recipients. Even a Republican Senate wouldn't buy that last year. But by golly, there it is in the budget.
What a charade.
Posted by Linkmeister at February 5, 2007 07:57 PM | TrackBackSo much for Democrats spending money that's not theirs, as the Other Party used to snidely say.
Posted by: Serge at February 6, 2007 10:38 AM