Commentary ~ March 3, 2005: The head of America’s
Federal Reserve Board said yesterday that the Bush Administration
is out of control in the way it is increasing the size of government.
If it keeps going this way, he said, the economy will collapse.
Greenspan made the comments during his testimony
to the House of Representatives Budget Committee.
"You cannot continuously introduce legislation
which tends to expand budget deficits because down the road the
impact of an ever-rising deficit, especially as a per cent of GDP,
creates some significant weakness in the structure of the economy,"
Greenspan said.
“The consequences for the U.S. economy of doing
nothing could be severe,” he added
During Bush's term in office, the federal budget
has swung from a record surplus to a record deficit — $412
billion (U.S.) last year. The White House says it expects to halve
the deficit before Bush leaves office in 2009, but financial markets
have grown jittery about the growing indebtedness. And skeptics
remain skeptical. Last month, President George Bush projected another
budget deficit at a record $427 billion for the 2005 fiscal year.
The debt keeps mounting under the leadership of this political tyrant
and his cabal of oligarchic henchmen.
"I fear that we may have already committed more
physical resources to the baby-boom generation in its retirement
years than our economy has the capacity to deliver," Greenspan
said.
"If existing promises need to be changed, those
changes should be made sooner rather than later," Greenspan
said.
Greenspan said worries about the budget are clouding
the economic outlook, "especially in the longer run."
Without "major deficit-reducing actions" by Congress,
he said, the budget isn't likely to shrink much in the next few
years.
One immediate outcome of Bush’s mishandling
of the economy is less money for the old and sick. As a consequence
of the ballooning deficit, Greenspan urged Congress yesterday to
move soon toward reducing future Social Security and Medicare benefits,
warning that to do otherwise will cause economic ''stagnation"
in coming decades.
Bush Moves to Hide His Spending from Public
Scrutiny
Rather than dealing with the deficit, Bush is taking
steps to hide his megalomaniacal spending out of the eye of the
public. His administration is sending records of more than a trillion
dollars worth of federal expenditures into a privately run database
that scholars and activists say hinders their ability to examine
how tax money is spent.
For the last 25 years, the public could peer into
the obscure world of federal contracting through sets of CDs made
available each quarter for as little as $60.
These computer records gave the public unfettered access to information
about more than $300 billion in nonclassified contracts the government
signs each year.
However, thanks to Bush and his criminal cronies,
that is no longer possible.
Two years ago, the General Services Administration paid an outside
contractor $24 million to build a new Web-based data system. The
Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation, designed by Virginia-based
Global Computer Enterprises, arrived in early January -- a year
late and with key search fields omitted. For example, viewers can't
search the database by product service code, which is the government
coding scheme for finding a product or a service that is being contracted.
Furthermore, users are required to sign a disclosure
agreement contract to receive a password and log-in that enables
the government to keep click-by-click records of an individual's
research.
