Back from the Mountains

Back safe and sound from the wilds of Western Virginia. Just a little snow and nothing that kept anyone from doing anything or going anywhere. All the remaining family got a chance to see each other and get caught up.
It's going to take me a couple of hours to get caught up this morning but I will be back in short order. Looks like a big discussion here on global climate change that needs some input but Steve Bates did an admirable job in my absence. Bush, for some reason, felt it necessary to visit the scene of one his biggest crimes one more time. I guess he is planning on swinging back through NOLA on the way back to the White House.

Linda J. Bilmes, lecturer in public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and University Professor of Economics at Columbia, describe the cost of the Bush Presidency in an article titled "The $10 Trillion dollar hangover: Paying the Price for the Bush years."

The result of deficit spending is debt. When President Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion. Now it is $10.6 trillion -- and Congress voted in October to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion, the seventh such hike since President Bush to office and the second since last July. If, as is quite likely, we reach the new ceiling by January 20, the outgoing President will have managed to amass more debt than all of his predecessors combined.

Bilmes and Stiglitz further state, "the total bill for Bush-era excess -- the total new debt combined with the total new accrued obligations -- amounts to $10.35 trillion."

The above is from the Great Orange Satan and will require more careful study.

Anyhow, let me catch up around here and I'll be back.