October 3, 2003 - The Bush Administration is asking Congress to take out a $600 Million loan for it. We should be asking what we are going to get for the money. How many first class teachers can you hire for $600 Million? How many textbooks could we buy? How many jobless Americans can be retrained for that money? How many airport security screeners could we keep on the job? But the borrowed $600 million won’t go for those purposes.

The Administration proposes to spend it in Iraq – to add to the $300 Million already borrowed to fund David Kay and Company, the Administrations last and best hope to find the elusive weapons of mass destruction. What will we get for the money? Well Dr. Kay has answered that.

“Even if no caches of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons are found, Dr. Kay said, the search will provide lessons on how to improve "the quality of intelligence." And even if there is "only a remote possibility" that aged weapons still exist, he said, it is vital to keep them out of the wrong hands.” http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/03/international/03ASSE.html?hp George W. Bush and his administrations wants us to spend $600 Million that we don’t have to learn how to fix the flawed intelligence that led him to start a pre-emptive war to prevent the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction that Iraq did not have.

Compared to the request that the Congress borrow $87 Billion to continue the guerilla war in Iraq and fix the damage that Bush’s pre-emptive war has done; or the $1.2 Trillion loan he already took out to fund the tax cut; that little $600 Million loan request seems to be a drop in the bucket. But it is just one more drop that added to the other drops that overflow the economic bucket.

With the deficit already pouring over the bucket’s rim we and Congress need recognize that every time the Administration asks to spend more money it is really asking to borrow the money. It already has borrowed the money to fund the tax cut to benefit the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Robert Novak. Now it is asking to borrow more for a tax cut so that the Corporations can bring home the profits they made by sending good paying jobs overseas tax free. We, and Congress, need to start asking, “Do we really need to borrow this money? Do we really need what we are getting for it? Will it be worth it to our kids when the credit card bill comes through?”

If the Administration’s fiscal policy continues to be “call Ditech dot com”, then we had better be looking up the number of a good bankruptcy lawyer. It will be something we can leave for our children. They are going to need it.