A few things nibbling at my psyche

A few things nibbling at my psyche:

The voters have spoken and they have decided that the folks who put us into the economic mess we are in would, by some odd logic, be the best people to get us out.  Oh my!  Am I being unfair to the right?  Maybe but let's look at the numbers.  Ronald Reagan, the great spokesman for "trickle down economics," entered office in the blustery winter of 1981.  He called for a balanced budget amendment but he himself never submitted anything resembling a balanced budget.  In fact, he entered office with a national debt of $1.3 trillion dollars and by 1992 when he left the Whitehouse he had steered the country into a $4.17 trillion dollar indebtedness – a nice cozy four hundred percent increase.   Nice going for the conservative smaller government party.   Clinton took the reins in 1992 and to be frank, under his watch the government debt did increase but only by a mere $1.1 trillion dollars to just at $5.19 trillion.  He spent a good deal of his Presidency answering to his sexual missteps but he still was able to pay down a big chunk of the national debt before leaving office but it was to no avail since George W. Bush managed to surrender any of Clinton's savings in another demonstration of "trickle down" that took the $5.19 trillion dollar national debt and raise it to – are you ready for this -  $12.3 trillion dollars in just eight years.  This is what Mr. Obama was given on inauguration day and in less than two years he has not been able to wipe out what twelve years of conservative trickle down economics managed to build.  Shame on him for not being a magician.  The answer, as noted above, was to elect the same type of economic blunderers that created this monstrous international embarrassment.   In light of what has happened under the previous miscreants, here is what the new crew sees as the solution to what is in fact, their problem.  First they want to insure that the wealthy in the US continue to get wealthier by extending tax breaks enacted by Bush – the guy who took us from $5 trillion to $12 trillion in indebtedness.  This will add $700 Billion to the national debt under the trickle down theory that if the wealthy are made richer they will invest it wisely in industries that will hire us measly peons and everyone will be happy.  This raises an obvious question – at least obvious to me – if that theory is so valid why did Mr. Obama enter office with thousands a citizens a day being laid off.  The Bush tax cuts had been in effect for eight years and during that eight years there was no burst of entrepreneurism, no withering of unemployment lines and no sudden burgeoning of this Nation's industrial base.  On the other hand the rich did get richer – obscenely so - and the poor did get poorer, tragically.   In spite of these obvious and easily obtainable statistics, the GOP has held fast in their demand that the JP Morgan's of America deserve to become even more wealthy.   To push our nose into their mess even further, they want to eliminate the inheritance tax settling, as it turned out, for a compromise of 35% tax on all inheritances valued at $5M or more.  This affects less than 10,000 Americans.  So much for a government "of the people."   Can you think of any other bill that affected only l0,000 people and tied up congress for so long?  Of course not unless it's their absolute panic at the thought of having homosexuals serving in the defense of this nation.   The number is probably not 10,000 but even if it were more, so what!  I have served with men and women whom I knew to be homosexuals and if their job performance were less than exemplary I would have taken appropriate action based on their performance alone and not what they did in the privacy of their personal lives.  I know of one General Officer, now retired, whose homosexuality was a commonly known fact but his battle expertise was unquestionable.   Nobody seemed to care about his private life.  Yet we can spin Congress up to a fine pitch by even mentioning such an unforgivable prospect.  This same Congress wants to cut back on Social Security while disapproving unemployment benefits.  Who benefits by these national safety nets?  Nobody on Knob Hill I can assure you so why not eliminate them altogether since the "trickle down" from their tax breaks will most certainly fill the gap.  Do you really believe this?  It is going to be a long hard winter especially when the real clowns move into their new offices on Capital Hill.  I think we should all cash in our savings and invest in Brazilian bananas or anything more secure than our own economic future in the US.