Tax Cuts for Millionaires and Free Money for Everyone!

Let's face it, we don't need a clendar to tell us the nineties are over.

Regardless whether you liked Bill Clinton (I did) or thought he was a degenerate who brought shame on the Oval Office (ditto), there's no denying the Clintonian nineties were pretty good to us all. Markets indices raced skyward, most people who wanted a job seemed able to find one, and the United States stood alone as the world's only super-power, seemingly able to swat its adversaries into submission.

But this decade, this century, this thousand years, well, it's started out quite different.

Almost from the start, we were attacked as we had never been before. The attack seemed all the more vicious--and to some extent numbing--for the way it woke us from the dreamy haze of our self-adulation. War and death on such a grand scale had always been something "over there." But from that very day our nation would be at war, our sense of ease and stability would vanish and--as we have seen--the very foundations of our capitalist system would start to weaken.

Did the satanic bastards who commandeered those airliners hope or even suspect such a thing would happen? Did the cowardly psychopathic Osama bin Laden--secreted salfely in his cave--expect this result? I doubt it. They were too blinded by their tortured pseudo-religious zealotry to see that far or that clearly into the future.

The wheels of economic disaster may have been set in motion that memorably clear September morning, but it took depressingly cynical policies to give them traction.

Our government (which is to say "we") started a war with no sense of shared sacrifice and even less intention to pay for it. Who knows even one rich person who did without something of value on account of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? That there was no link between the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war, is of no importance; it was and is a war, and the extent of most Americans' involvement has been to affix a meaningless magnetic gold ribbon to the fender of their Escalades, exhorting us all to "Support our Troops." Pardon the language, but fuck them and the gas guzzlers they rode in on.

Not one American has paid a dime more taxes to support our war effort. But make no mistake, their children will. We have charged our adventurism to an account that won't be paid for generations. No such thing as a free lunch? To the contrary, Americans are being force-fed their free lunch every day in the form of so-called earmarks to the federal budget, arms programs designed more for the last war than for the next one, and entire federal departments of questionable value--the departments of Education, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development come immediately to mind, as does the Department of Veterans affairs, the work of which should logically be done by the Department of Defense.

The Department of the Treasury also seems of questionable value, but like many of its wards, is currently too big to fail.

So, having grown used to largesse only the federal government can provide, Americans find that the carnival atmosphere has ended, and with it, the proverbial music, the cessation of which has revealed an eternal truth: there aren't enough chairs for everyone.

But so accustomed have Americans grown to being bribed with their own money, they have elected a slick young President (is it live? or is it teleprompter?) who, for all his outsized qualities knows nothing about business, yet promises an eager electorate that it can have everything. And at such a price!

But he's wrong. And his cheerleaders on the left are as unwilling to do without their government-run, mega-dollar health plan, as the right was previously unwilling to do without its tax-cuts for millionaires.

The fact is, no one wants to do without anything. Both sides of the political spectrum are so busy blaming the other, they're each too busy talking to hear the bad news of their own addiction to federal money.

Regardless where all this spending is going or who will pay for it, that's a bad thing.