TRIFECTA!

[Octafish]

Besides seafan, who remembers the little turd from Crawford's statement?

"Lucky me. I hit the trifecta." -- George Walker Bush, actin' pretzeldent, Sept. 15, 2001



Krugman was prophetic:

It's Clear Bush Tax Cuts Have Hurt Americans

by Paul Krugman
Published on Sunday, December 9, 2001 in the Boulder Daily Camera

Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush interrupted his inveighing against evildoers to crack a joke. Bush had repeatedly promised to run an overall budget surplus at least as large as the Social Security surplus, except in the event of recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he remarked to Mitch Daniels, his budget director. "I hit the trifecta."

Lucky him, indeed. The Enron analogy will soon become a tired cliche, but in this case the parallel is irresistible. Enron management and the administration the company did so much to place in power applied the same strategy: First, use cooked numbers to justify big giveaways at the top. Then, if things don't work out, let ordinary workers who trusted you pay the price. But Enron executives got caught; Bush believes that the events of Sept. 11 will let him off the hook.

Earlier this year Bush used projections of vast budget surpluses to push through a huge, 10-year tax cut. Most of that tax cut went to people with incomes of more than $200,000 per year. Now Daniels tells us that the budget — not just the budget outside Social Security, but the whole enchilada — will be in deficit through 2004. Since the administration's phony budget math ("fuzzy" just doesn't cut it at this point) gets phonier the further you go into the future, this means that we have effectively returned to a state of permanent deficit.

However, with television busy reporting from the caves of Tora Bora, this revelation — which shows that the tax cut was sold on utterly false premises — wasn't even considered headline news.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1209-04.htm

Gee. Missed and forgotten by Corporate McPravda and our current crop of elected officials: the trifecta wasn't lucky for America. The rich are vastly richer. The middle classes are becoming the new poor. The old poor are clear-off the radar. And the country? It's nearly broken, drowned in a small bathtub filled with red ink. Mission accomplished.