We are so fucked . . .

Treasury Secretary John Snow:

I am confident you will see a budget which is quite austere, a budget that's going to have a lot of Cabinet agency heads, government agency heads scrambling to manage in a more constrained resource environment.

Once upon a time a Treasury Secretary would not have been "confident" the next budget was going to be an austerity budget, that Americans were going to have to get used to living in the third world. No, the secretary would have been sorrowful, perhaps, or regretful. In a just world, maybe even ashamed.

But now, we're proud of the fact that fewer kids will be going to college, that enforcement of our health, environmental, and civil regulations is going to essentially disappear, our elderly can choose between heat, medicine or food, and that if you're stuck on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, you may as well learn to enjoy the view, cause you're sure as hell not going anywhere soon.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world:

China's economy was elevated to the world's fourth biggest, overtaking France and Britain, after the government announced robust economic growth of 9.9 percent in 2005.


Fueled by booming investment and active consumer spending, China's gross domestic product (GDP) rose to 18.2 trillion yuan (2.3 trillion dollars) last year, the National Bureau of Statistics said.

The 2005 growth rate, which took inflation into account, followed an expansion of 10.1 percent in 2004 and 10 percent in 2003. The performance also matched the average growth rate of 9.9 percent recorded between 1993 and 2004.

Statistics bureau director Li Deshui characterized China's economy in 2005 as "fairly good.

"The stability of the economic performance was strengthened to some extent and progress was seen in more balanced development," he told a briefing in Beijing.

China has now jumped from sixth to fourth on the list of the world's biggest economies, overtaking France and Britain.

In 2004, France's economy totaled two trillion dollars and Britain's was worth 2.14 trillion dollars but they recorded far slower rates of growth than China last year.

Britain announced on Wednesday economic growth of just 1.8 percent in 2005.

So, while the US government pisses away 2 billion dollars a week in Iraq, it neglects security and infrastructure needs at home, decides that an unskilled and uneducated workforce is fine for the 21st century (because all we're going to need are cannon fodder and wombs anyway, right?), and basically pisses away what remains of its foreign policy credibility blustering about Iranian nukes, the Chinese are now what, 5 years? 10? away from becoming the largest economy in the world, and then what? We'll all have jobs making cast resin models of the Great Wall and the Forbidden Palace for all the tourists visiting China?

Confident?

I'm confident that this is the worst bunch of people to ever run this country. I'm less confident that we'll be able to take it back before they fuck it up permanently.