It's the war economy, stupid

From Columbia Missourian :

A January 2008 report by the National Priorities Project indicates that the U.S., to date, has spent $495 billion on the War in Iraq. According to political scientist Chalmers Johnson, “The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the 'smartest guys in room'... (However), the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.”

When George W. Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001, the national debt was approximately $5.7 trillion. Today that debt exceeds $9 trillion. If one assumes a 5 percent interest rate for future payments, the Bush debt will require the government to pay its creditors, including the Japanese and Chinese, some $200 billion a year indefinitely, even before any of the nation's pressing health, education, employment and infrastructure problems are addressed. The Bush administration's record is, to say the least, hypocritical given the Republican mantra that Democrats are “tax and spend liberals,” while its own policy of “ borrow and spend” has dug the country's economy into a seemingly endless morass.