The Widening Chasm

New claims for unemployment emerge today and near half a million more Americans find themselves jobless, home foreclosures are up six percent from the same month last year when the housing crisis was thought to be peaking, the revelation emerges that billions of bailout dollars were sent abroad to repay foreign banks at a hundred cents on the dollar while most Americans who sustained loss were not made whole. And Federal spending bleeds into a hemorrhage of freshly printed dollars squandered by our political elite. My father, who remembers the Great Depression from living through it, suggested we are in a hole and that our political class is greasing the sides up (perhaps with light,sweet Gulf of Mexico crude oil) to give us a hand, and I would suggest that their plans instead of handing us a ladder up are merely throwing in a shovel to dig us deeper. President George W. Bush contended with a Democratic Congress his last two years and in working in conjunction with the Democrats gave us bailouts and increased US debt and deficits. They were a problem yet still manageable. What has happened with the Obama growth of government has made the conundrum virtually insoluble. Real solutions to today's dire economic straits do not involve raising taxes or allowing Bush's so-called tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. The end of the crisis will not come when we are taxed more, but when our government spends less.