Assisted Suicide of the U.S. Economy!

On January 30th, 2008, newspapers around the world featured a large picture of President Bush and Vice President Cheney with the headline "Bush sees no recession." In the picture, President Bush was squinting and smirking, and Cheney had his hands together in a Masonic signal and had a knowing smirk on his face. The event was the State of the Union Address. (1) Since that infamous speech, it has been one disaster after another in our economy. In January and February 2008, 152,000 jobs were lost, and in March 2008, an additional 80,000 jobs were lost. This is nearly a quarter-million jobs lost in the first quarter of the year of 2008. (2) With many banks facing serious meltdown, the Federal Reserve turned on the money pumps and auctioned $260 billion in short term loans to the banks. (3) Our national debt is now nearly nine and one-half trillion dollars and can now be measured with numbers so large that such numbers had heretofore been used only in astronomy calculations. The amount of debt is increasing almost exponentially. It is so bad that the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group, recently issued a report which stated, "The present rate of debt increase will leave a total shortfall of 72.3 trillion dollars in Social Security and Medicare alone by the year 2080." (4) This deficit for only these two departments would be eight times our current national debt! Even our current debt is unsustainable.