$3,889,136,064,463

That's a lot of money and that is what the US OMB says is the total cost of the Bush admin's tax cuts and spending increases, as reported by Jason Furman. Wow! I sure hope they got value for money spent. But peering across the Canadian border, I sure don't get the sense that all that Bush financial finagling did much good for anyone except his crony capitalist buddies.

The fiscal damage to the United States over the last seven years is calculable. It is precisely $3,889,136,064,463, according to the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget, which totaled up the budgetary cost to date of all the tax cuts and spending increases enacted over the past seven years. Of that nearly $4 trillion total, the administration estimates that 46 percent is tax cuts, 31 percent is defense and homeland-security spending, and 23 percent is everything else, including the prescription-drug benefit.

My cynical side wonders why there is a rising cry about "deficits" and "budgets" just as Bush is leaving office. Isn't this the same movie that we saw in the 1990s? When the torch was handed to Clinton all those long, solemn faces pontificated about "lock boxes", "spending restraint", and "deficit reduction". Clinton delivered, then when the "conservatives" came into power, suddenly the long, solemn faces (Greenspan?) moaned that the surplus was too big, the bond market would suffer, some way had to be found through tax cutting or spending to undo the impending damage. Well, thanks to George Bush, the damage was done, in comes a new cast of characters, and now those long, solemn faces are saying "the cupboard is bare" the US cannot afford to spend, it cannot have universal medical care. Hmm... these reruns are worse than the horror shows on late night TV!