A rising deficit lifts all yahts

Amazing really. Six years of the Bush regency, four years of Republican control of all branches of the federal government, and it becomes obvious that there's really only been one objective, one "idea. " It isn't about shrinking the federal government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub; it isn't about national security; it isn't about government accountability, waste or bureaucracy; it isn't about a muscular foreign policy; it's not about the Fourth Amendment; it's not about an "owndership society; and it's most certainly not about ending the practice of abortion in this country...all areas Republicans promised (or hinted promising) to deliver once they attained power.

No, it's all been about one overriding urge: to eliminate any sort of progressivity in our federal taxes and, more specifically, to deliver on the promises they made to their wealthiest, most important supporters regardless of the cost to the national as a whole. And by "cost," most assuredly, I mean that in the most literal of senses.

"A $2.7 trillion budget plan pending before the House would raise the federal debt ceiling to nearly $10 trillion, less than two months after Congress last raised the federal government's borrowing limit.

The provision -- buried on page 121 of the 151-page budget blueprint -- serves as a backdrop to congressional action this week. House leaders hope to try once again to pass a budget plan for fiscal 2007, a month after a revolt by House Republican moderates and Appropriations Committee members forced leaders to pull the plan.

Leaders also hope to pass a package of tax-cut extensions that would cost the Treasury $70 billion over the next five years. They would then turn Thursday to a $513 billion defense policy bill that would block President Bush's request to raise health-care fees and co-payments for service members and their families. (...)

With passage of the budget, the House will have raised the federal borrowing limit by an additional $653 billion, to $9.62 trillion. It would be the fifth debt-ceiling increase in recent years, after boosts of $450 billion in 2002, a record $984 billion in 2003, $800 billion in 2004 and $653 billion in March. When Bush took office, the statutory borrowing limit stood at $5.95 trillion."

Well, I guess in defense of the Republican-controlled Congress, even as they extend tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the wealthiest, they're defying Bush on raising healthcare fees for the service members he's been doing his damndest to have killed.