A Peak Into The Bush Budget

While our media is focused on Anna Nicole Smith, Brittney Spears and the weather, some people spent a little time dissecting the recent budget that the Bush Administration gave us. Matt Taibbi, with a little help from the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders, gives us a few examples.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

VA budget? But I thought they were for the troops? I bet Walter Reed Medical Center would like that $3.4 billion. And to pad the pockets of less than one percent of Americans while Medicaid, the VA, education, heating and oil for the poor and whatever else they could get their hands on gets cut, is crazy. Or as Matt says

That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and competition in the corporate marketplace.

Well said Mr. Taibbi.