Imagine for a moment that you took all your credit cards and maxed them out. Now take your mortgage and borrow the maximum on it. Cash in the kid's college fund, your rainy day savings, your 401(k) retirement savings. While you're at it, stop paying for your health insurance and the maintenance on your house, your car and your yard. Now take all that money and spend it. Feeling pretty flush? Sure you are. You just pumped tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars into your pocket.
But you'd never do that.
Because you know that just because you'd be living large for the time being, you wouldn't be wealthier. In fact, you'd be getting poorer by the minute.
And yet, that's exactly what Bush's recovery is -- a giant borrowing binge. But he'd rather you didn't know that. In February, the administration buried a report from its own Treasury Department that said our current fiscal policies, the ones Bush likes to claim are bringing on a "recovery," would create more than $44 trillion in chronic debt.
John Atcheson is dead on the money regarding our economic "recovery" with this article.