Latest Budget
I know that a lot of others are covering the obvious issues with the latest budget. Some are concerned with the cuts to education and health, others with the increases to the military’s budget, now the largest in history. So I won’t bother going into that.
Instead, I wanted to focus on a little talked-about provision apparently snuck in at the last moment. The provision is hard to find, and is under the title “Make Bush the Richest Man in the World” somewhere in the appendix. Basically, it calls for a simple use fee (tax) added to all goods that come from Venezuela, including their oil! If you calculate it all out, Bush would be worth about $1T in 10 years!
From a press conference, Bush gave as his reason for the provision: “Of course the money is not for me. I’m a religious man, but my wife, she told me to go for it. I’m agona use all the money to help the good people of Americans. It is simply not true that I’ll be starting my own private army.”
Luckily for Bush, in the provision is an escape clause. Called the Rove clause, it says: “If the provision is canceled for any reason Bush immediately gets $500B”. I wonder who put that in there?
I don’t know, it seems to be a bad precedent.