Money matters

CAMPAIGN ADS IN THE FEDERAL BUDGET
The first Bush budget, for Fiscal Year 2003, was full of cartoons, including one depicting government as a bunch of Lilliputians tying down the American people. This one is full of these ridiculous campaign photos. No president in history has produced budgets like this, and there should be a little more outrage about this. Or, the Bush-Cheney Committee should just pay for the ads...  More, including the "ads".


UNMET NEED HITS RECORD LEVEL FOR THE UNEMPLOYED
With the ending of the federal Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation (TEUC) program, jobless workers whose regular, state-funded unemployment insurance benefits run out before they can find a job no longer qualify for any federal unemployment aid. An estimated 375,000 unemployed individuals are exhausting their regular unemployment benefits in January without qualifying for any further assistance — and are receiving neither a paycheck nor unemployment benefits. Based on the latest data, nearly two million unemployed workers are expected to be in this situation during the first six months of 2004.

In no other month on record — and in no other six-month period for which data are available — have so many unemployed workers exhausted their regular unemployment benefits without being able to receive additional aid. This finding holds even if the number of exhaustees in previous years is adjusted upward to reflect the growth in the labor force since then.   article


IS SOROS PLANNING 'OCTOBER SURPRISE' FOR BUSH?

New York Times best-selling author and investigative reporter Kenneth R. Timmerman details in the current edition of Insight Magazine ("Will George Soros Panic the Market?") how such an October Surprise might play out.

"This market is thin enough that if you made a big move all of a sudden you could move it," Bartlett told the magazine. "At some point, something could happen on its own, and then someone like George Soros could turn a minor blip into something else."...  article


BUSH MISLEADS PUBLIC ABOUT CAUSE OF DEFICIT
On the same day the White House unveiled its 2005 budget, President Bush calculatingly obscured the reason the nation now faces a record $500 billion deficit. He said, "The reason we are where we are, in terms of the deficit, is because we went through a recession, we were attacked, and we're fighting a war."

But according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the single biggest cause of the deficit is the president's massive tax cuts for the wealthy -- which he conveniently did not mention.  article