Spending On The Road To Nowhere

The BBC, that bastion of left-wing anti-American thinking (according to "fair and balanced" Rupert Murdoch and various other wingnuts), has this to say about Bush's spending plans:

The US government could finance the increased spending on Katrina by either raising taxes or cutting spending on other items.

Public opinion polls suggest that the public supports higher taxes to help Katrina victims, by a margin of 56% to 37%.

Neither is likely to happen.

Or we could get more detailled, as according to Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria writing on MSNBC (hat tip simianbrain):

People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.

Or for those of you who like pictures, this is from the Congressional Budget Office, via the BBC.



And that was BEFORE Katrina!

Does anyone not get it yet? As Zakaria says, Bush is the "most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history" - but if the BBC said that they would be biased.