Borrowing his way out of debt

Margaret Colson has a strong piece up on Bloomberg.com:

President George W. Bush finally responded to the protesters camped outside his Texas ranch.

He did it a thousand miles away, before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City. On a stop en route to a vacation within a vacation in Idaho, Bush broke his near silence about the country's almost 2,000 war dead.

``Each of these men and women left grieving families and loved ones back home,'' Bush said. ``We owe them something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for.''

Reading Bush's empty, bankrupt rhetoric for the umpteenth time, it hit me what the latest rationale for the continued insanity in Iraq really boils down to: Bush is finally acknowledging the mountain of debt he has incurred, in lives and human suffering. And he wants to borrow his way out of it.

Well, folks, as anyone who lived through the leveraged buyout frenzy of the '80s knows, you can't borrow your way out of debt. Bush can play the game with OPM (which he now redefines as Other Peoples' Mothers), but in the end, he is going to walk away with the debt unpaid, leaving others to suffer uncompensated.

Every time he talks about the debt, we need to repeat: you can't borrow your way out of debt. The grief of the mother of the next dead American soldier does not salve the pain of the thousands of Cindy Sheehans, it magnifies it. And the debt just grows larger.