I've been thinking about the implications of this loss since Wednesday, trying to frame the struggle ahead. I've realized that of all the disasters that we can expect, the absolute worst one is the deficit spending. We have no reason to believe that Bush will cut the deficits as he promises, since he promised to veto over-budget spending in 2000 and look what he did. This means we are looking at 4 years of .5 TRILLION dollar deficits, added to a current debt of 7.3 TRILLION. If it were simply cumulative(and it's not, there's constant increase due to compound interest, that wonderful phenomenon that GWB likes so much), that would mean that the debt would be 9.3 trillion (127% increase) and the corresponding interest payments would be the 380 billion we payed this year times 1.27 = 482 billion. Current revenues are 1.3 trillion, and Bush insists on making his tax cuts permanent, so we would at that point be spending more than a third of our taxes on interest payments.
Logically, in order to maintain services, we would have to increase borrowing to compensate, which would promt our lenders to raise interest rates (or worse, collect on our debts), starting a very nasty economic spiral into insolvency. At that point, our government turns into Argentina. Screw health care, medicare, medicaid, environmental protection, welfare, heck, even infrastructure. We don't want THIS to be the cost of getting a democrat elected in 2008.
So start writing your congresspeople, LTE's, moveon, heck, even free republic. If our government continues its merry path, all our partisan discussions will be obsolete, so now's the time to get a national consensus: cut spending and raise taxes. There's a war on, so there's an excuse, if your children's future isn't enough for you.