Update: National Bureau of Economic Research says the U.S. economy fell into a recession last year.
Among the pathological programs pursued by the Bush administration is its enterprise to turn the national debt from prospects made in 2001 of the debt being completely paid off in 10 years to upping the debt to $10 trillion.

'Deficits don't matter,' infamously mumbled Dick Cheney at a high-level meeting that was recalled by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil.

Worse is the wish list that the rightwingers wanted from the future administrations dealing with the massive debt: Eliminating those awful programs like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare which would become unsustainable because of the debt purposefully piled up by Bush and Cheney.

Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman warns today that president-elect Obama should not clean up the fiscal mess immediately in the face of a dangerous recession, and views government spending as a economic imperative to ending the recession:

(C)ircumstances right now are anything but normal. ...

As this is being written we are in the midst of the second day of testimony before Congress by Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson in support of the Administration’s proposed financial rescue package. The basic sales pitch is that the Nation’s financial problems are at this moment so severe that the only solution is to expose to risk $700 billion dollars of taxpayer money to buy assets with a currently unknown price…and to give the absolute and total power over what those valuations are, what should and should not be bought, what repayment terms will be sought—and additionally, what happens to any money recovered--to one man, Henry Paulson. There are those who are not on board.
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