As we approached deadline, the US Debt Clock’s Web site says that the national debt is $8,357,484,356,949.69. (Most of us don’t even know how to read that number aloud.) It’s sufficient to know that each of America’s 298,700,961 residents has a $27,968.97 share of responsibility for that deficit. Gluttons for punishment can watch that debt — and their share of it — increase daily at www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Meanwhile, the Senate has just passed another law allowing the top two percent of America’s wealthiest citizens even more opportunities to pay even less of their share of taxes. Apparently, the assorted capital gains advantages and other tax loopholes W has pushed through for them (and his family) just weren’t benevolent enough.
Americans wondering why the Senate would do such a thing need only look at the number of senators who will personally benefit from the new guidelines. In 2003, CNN counted 40 millionaires in the Senate, many with incomes of tens, and even hundreds, of millions of dollars a year. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has a net worth of somewhere between $164 million and $211 million, while Wisconsin’s Herb Kohl has to scrape by on $111 million, and West Virginia’s Sen. John J. Rockefeller claims just a measly $81.6 million. No wonder these guys need a tax break.
Meanwhile, the average working stiff is depositing his or her paycheck directly into the local gas station these days. Gasoline is up anywhere from 50 to 80 cents a gallon more than what it cost a year ago. At the pump, people are spending anywhere from $3.50 a gallon in San Diego to a mere $2.75 is some parts of Dick Cheney’s home state of Wyoming. (What a coincidence!)
In a move that brings new meaning to insult, Senator Frist suggested giving each of us a check for $100 to help forget the energy mess we’re in.
The war in Iraq has cost $250 billion thus far — not counting the nearly 2500 dead soldiers that even the Government Accounting Office dares not put a price tag on. The correlation of dead to debt, however, does come out to $100 million per flag-draped coffin, no bargain even in dollar terms. Which reminds me, the once almighty dollar has been worth about 25 cents less than the Euro and almost 80 cents less than the British pound for years now.
We have 130,000 troops in Iraq and 341,000 troops elsewhere on the globe (Japan, Korea, Europe, the Pacific). This leaves about 956,000 American troops waiting for orders in the USA. If we end up taking on Iran and North Korea on nuclear proliferation, it will pretty much wipe us out.
General Michael Hayden awaits confirmation to head the CIA while a few Americans express outrage that “tens of millions” of us have had our telephone records surveyed by the feds. As head of the National Security Administration, Hayden oversaw warrant-less wiretapping of thousands more of us. This makes the score Fox 3: Henhouse 0, and decimates our constitutional protections under Amendment 14.
The disintegration of our liberty and privacy, meanwhile, is tied directly to the manipulation of just two numbers: 9/11.
