Bush leaves a little ten trillion dollar broken nest for President Barack Obama

    It isn't easy to imagine how much space $10 trillion dollars would occupy if you were to stack the bills in neat little piles. Probably a lot more than most reader's living space. Even so, you would have great difficulty imagining how much ten trillion is, especially If you were to add to that another $5 trillion or so for trifles such as the financial bailout the U.S. federal government has forked over to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and a growing list of other companies begging  Washington for money...begging or threatening. Well, that is the bill outgoing President George Bush has deposited in President Barack Obama's lap.

   This data and those used in the body of this article come from an investigation by Linda J. Bilmes, lecturer in public finance at Harvard University's Kennedy School, and 2001 Nobel Prize in economics winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, published in the current issue of Harper's magazine. We have taken the liberty to put this data into context.

   The figures, as astonishing as they may seem, merely lay bare the essence of the economic, political and social notions of the exponents of free market capitalism, adopted as dogma by Bush and his conservative and evangelical followers, doctrines avidly put into practice in numerous countries around the world, and severely questioned by others--particularly in Latin America.

   Let's look at the figures. Under the Bush era corporate profits soared ahead by 68%; families in poverty by 19%; the cost of a family health insurance premium jumped ahead by 87%.Between 2002 and 2006 the wealthiest 10 percent of households were benefited by an increase in income of more than 95%; the nations richest 15,000 families doubled their annual income, from $15 million to $30 million.

   Since the Second World War the United States has based its prosperity on what is called "deficit spending." That is, you grow by borrowing. Even liberal economists used to argue that deficit financing was essential to keep the economy on its feet. However, that was when the debt was taken within the country. Under Bush--in order to pay for the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and to compensate for the enormous tax reductions granted to giant corporations--the country went shopping abroad for credit and loans. According to the Harpers article the share of public debt that is owed to foreign nationals has risen from 31 percent in 2000 to 46 percent today, that is, almost half is taken from countries such as China, India, Japan and the Middle East. Put more simply: every man, woman and child in the U.S. owes $9,000 to some other country.

   The source of the lopsided spending: mainly, defense and the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, (whose total cost is put at close to $3 trillion), also the net interest on the debt, now the fourth largest spending category in the federal budget. Under Bush the national debt has nearly doubled. Meanwhile, some 4 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared, 5 million more citizens have no health insurance and a fifth of homeowners are bound to end up owing more in mortgage debnt than their homes are actually worth.

   The theory of the free market fans was that in stimulating big business, people would spend more and by reducing government regulations on finance the "drip down" would benefit everyone. More than that it led to record financial scandals, and appealed to the consumer society's unquenched appetite. Buy more was the solution. More cars, more contamination, more plastics, more destruction of the environment--a subject that was almost completely abandoned as useless by Bush. 

   The Obama Administration thus has a very heavy agenda to deal with. In effect the U.S. economy has undergone a sort of "socialization," in the sense that government has been forced to take over private business--in the form of bail outs--and the extremely individualistic and consumer oriented citizens must look for participation in mutual help activities to keep things afloat.

    A key question is whether or not Obama--unusually consistent in complying with election promises after just days in office--will be able to reverse the extremely expensive and unpopular wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Although he has promised to get out of Iraq, that process will probably take much longer than expected. At the same time he has advocated greater involvement in Afghanistan, at a time when European allies are expressing growing insatisfaction with their participation in that war. With its enormous economic problems on the home front, will the U.S. be able to continue its extremely costly wars? in Afghanistan and...? What will the Whitehouse's response be should another "·scenario" appear on the international map?