After selling us on a ten-year, $400 billion expansion of Medicare, the White House now tells us it's going to cost a teensy bit more:
Instead of a $400 billion 10-year price tag, Bush's 2005 budget will estimate the Medicare bill's cost at about $540 billion, said aides who spoke on condition of anonymity. Bush will submit on Monday a federal budget for the fiscal year 2005, which starts next Oct. 1.
Bush just signed the Medicare measure into law last month. While it was moving through Congress, Bush, White House officials and congressional Republican leaders had assured doubting conservatives that the bill's costs would stay within the $400 billion estimate.
Usuaully, a program has to be in actual existence for a year or two before it blows past estimates by that much. That means that you ain't seen nothin' yet. This is gonna be a trillion-dollar sinkhole by 2016.
That's trillion, with a T.
Show me a candidate other than Bush who is not an advocate of the status quo ante in the Middle East, and I might drop Bush like an empty bottle of Laphroiag that's been refilled with the worst swill from the bottom shelf of the local liqour establishment on skid row.
This is great, we are being railroaded into Billions and Billions of dollars of extra spending because we dont have anyone else to depend on. I thought that Conservatives were supposed to be about rational limits to what Government can achieve.
The truth of the matter is that the country hasnt moved to the right, just the right has moved towards the center where the rest of the country resides. And people like the National Review are starting to understand just how pissed off the base is towards Bush. This is why they have started holding their noses and backing his nonsense up. Witness their embracing of the NEA funding, its ONLY 20 million dollars....you know the old saying, spend 20 million here and 20 million there and pretty soon we are talking about some real money.
And on top of it all our soldiers are underquipped, they lack Personal Body Armor and other essential equipment while we gleefully send money to some freak who cant make it any other way. ABSURD. Arent we still at war?
PAPADOC
Aren't a lot of those troops national guard and it hasn't been the policy of giving them the gold-plated equipment??
You and the Missus best provide a few more taxpayers, post haste. ;-)
