I'm not surprised that these GOP politicians have suddenly found their fiscal conservative jackets. They were in the closet for quite some time. Now every whiney one of them is really concerned about my children and their children. Well how about me? Are you now going to publicly apologize to me for the government debt that was built up by YOU during the Reagan administration? Will you apologize to my sister's daughter who will be born in June for the debt that piled up in the Bush administration? I didn't think so.
From Federalbudget.com
In Fiscal Year 2008, the U. S. Government spent $412 Billion of your money on interest payments* to the holders of the National Debt.
$412 Billion! You want me to apologize to your children John Thune? I want my apology first.
This legislation is both enormous and it endangers our country's future economic health, the US debt burden is huge, but it's going to rise 54% in just the next two years, and that is before we take into account this Omnibus spending bill that's still to come before the Congress, another round of TARP... we will add an additional 2 trillion dollars to our national debt, that means higher debt to our children, our grandchildren, and actually just in a few years to almost all Americans.
- John Ensign on the floor of the US Senate Feb 13, 2009.
TreasuryDirect.gov has the totals on Interest Expense on debt outstanding
2008 $451,154,049,950.63
2007 $429,977,998,108.20
2006 $405,872,109,315.83
2005 $352,350,252,507.90
2004 $321,566,323,971.29
2003 $318,148,529,151.51
2002 $332,536,958,599.42
2001 $359,507,635,242.41
$2,971,113,856,847.19 Trillion Dollars spent on interest on US debt during the George W. Bush presidency.
And Lamar Alexander says today that
If we were to save one million dollars a day every day since Jesus Christ was born, we'd still have less money than the cost of this bill.
That means we'd have to save at least $3.5 million every day since Jesus Christ was born to pay the interest on national debt from the George Bush Republican Presidency. Even that would be worthwhile if they had spent it on something for future economies; rather than for war, tax cuts and gross defense department waste. Reaganomics has had it's run. We've seen what busting unions has done. We've seen what unregulated capitalism has done. We know that a dollar spent on social services, a dollar spent on schools goes much further than a dollar spent on tax cuts. That link provides dollar values from Conservative economist Mark Zandi from the shameless Moody's (They were one of the rating agencies that rated what's now called illiquid assets as AAA). Even he concludes that food stamps are the best stimulus and tax cuts the least that he checks out.
Mark Zandi should check into F-22 Raptors. That's a $65 Billion dollar program that has provided 127 stealth aircraft. Chalmers Johnson has a great piece that goes into both how the military-industrial complex secures never-ending funding for pork projects and how the F-22 Raptor has almost no purpose.
Using the F-22 to Fight the F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is cancelled. Threats are also made -- and put into effect -- to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not cancelled.
Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 -- the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either of them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built."
I'd like to see how many pennies of growth one dollar spend on the most expensive fighter plane ever built will create.
OK. So here's the deal. If you Republicans apologize to me now for spending my parents' tax dollars on bogus stealth aircraft, for cutting taxes while fighting two wars, for fighting two wars on my tax dollars, for busting unions, for deregulating Wall-Street, for ignoring big box monopolies, then I will apologize to you. But not until we see the results of how this Obama administration's eight years of spending concludes.
Schumer is on it. Today in the Senate he gave my diary as a speech as I was writing it. Oh well.
I've heard much talk from the other side, claiming that they are against this package claim because it increases the budget deficit and national debt too much. For Instance, I heard my good friend from Arizona this morning talking about generational theft. There's one surprising thing Mr. President when we talked about a trillion dollars against the War in Iraq all told.
We never heard about generational theft... When President Bush talked about 2 Trillion Dollars in tax cuts, mainly for the wealthy, did we ever hear the word generational theft? Did we ever hear that we shouldn't do tax cuts for the wealthy or fund the war in Iraq... No we didn't. We didn't hear any qualms from the other side. The GOP was a borrow and spend party for each of the eight years that President Bush was in office. They doubled the national debt in eight years and by some estimates added 30 trillion dollars to future liabilities... our friends on the other side of the aisle simply have no credibility when it comes to the issues of deficits and debt because until three months ago they didn't give a hoot about it. Only now when there's government programs for education, and health care and transportation. Do we hear about government debt, but we never hear about it when it comes to funding wars over seas in Iraq, tax cuts for the wealthy, that's perfectly OK. Where were our colleagues on the other side of the aisle for the last eight years as the debt skyrocketed, as generational theft occured, where was the gentleman from Arizona??
UPDATE: Here's a link to the CSPAN Senate Debate on this. I'm about a half hour behind because I was trying to write down what they've been saying.
UPDATE 2: I made some minor adjustments.