How Many and Yes That Means You

How many people in these United States will go bankrupt this year due to the costs of catastrophic illnesses and exhorbitant medical bills?

"Illness and medical bills caused half of the 1,458,000 personal bankruptcies in 2001, according to a study published by the journal Health Affairs.

The study estimates that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans annually -- counting debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children."

That was in 2001, back when Bush was cutting taxes like a crazy man (which he is) because Clinton had left him; yes, Bush personally, a surplus, and Bush wanted to give this money back to "the people." That was an ill-conceived plan, and he was lying anyways.

The Bush tax cuts have contributed to revenues dropping in 2004 to the lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950, and have been a major contributor to the dramatic shift from large projected budget surpluses to projected deficits as far as the eye can see.

The tax cuts have conferred the most benefits, by far, on the highest-income households — those least in need of additional resources — at a time when income already is exceptionally concentrated at the top of the income spectrum.

The design of these tax cuts was ill-conceived, resulting in significantly less economic stimulus than could have been accomplished for the same budgetary cost. In part because the tax cuts were not as effective as alternative measures would have been, job creation during this recovery has been notably worse than in any other recovery since the end of World War II.

No worries. Your kids and grandchildren will just have to give every cent they ever earn over in interest payments to the Chinese and the Saudis. Your own income is being siphoned off to the tune of $300 billion a year just to service the interest on the debts run up by Saint Ronnie a generation ago.



"This year, [2006] over $300 billion of the federal budget is interest on a debt that Reagan ran up in order to make the economy look good, on borrowed money, to get himself reelected. That's enough money to provide full scholarships to public universities for over 15 million students."

There's roughly 300 million of us Americanos so that works out to about a thousand dollars a year for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. It was worth it, just so Reagan could drop the tax rates on the richest Americans and their corporations, wasn't it? Aren't you happy to be contributing your share to this worthy cause?

Of course, Reagan raised FICA taxes by 25%, which hit people who then made $40,000 a year or less the hardest. How many people did that affect? Did it affect you? Does it affect you still?

If you are a nurse, the answer to that last question is "yes." The way you can tell is to look at your fucking pay stub. And recall that all that FICA money has been sucked out of the Social Security "lockbox" to go into the general fund, so Reagan's debts don't look as bad as they really are.

If people don't have health insurance, nurses won't get paid.

If taxes are skewed towards screwing the middle and working classes then that's you, fellow nurses, who get stuck with Republican presidents' debts, wars, and no-bid phony military-industrial contracts.

Who are you going to thank for this?

People like this sociopath?



Or people like this?



"For the fourth consecutive year, nurses have earned the top spot on Gallup's annual survey among professions on honesty and ethical standards, with 82 percent of Americans giving the profession a "very high" or "high" rating. Since being added to the list in 1999, nurses have held this distinction all but one year - in 2001 - when firefighters received the highest ranking following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

In 1985 Reagan travelled to Germany to meet with Helmut Kohl, and while there he ceremoniously laid a wreath at the Kolmeshohe cemetery. No American soldiers were interred there; indeed, WWII American remains have been removed from Germany. But the grounds do hold the graves of forty-nine Waffen Schutzstaffel, the Nazi elite guard created in 1923 as Hitler's personal army and later notoriously expanded by Himmler.

The SS included the worst of the worst, the Totenkopf: the death camp guards.