I’m reading the Wall Street Journal this morning and come across this lead story: “BUSH SENT CONGRESS a $2.4 trillion election-year budget featuring big increases for defense and homeland security, as he faces a record $521 billion deficit.” Now, maybe it’s just me, but everyone I talk to is telling me what a hard time they’re having with their finances, some of my best buddies have been laid off or had their companies close down, and in the writing community it’s hard to find someone who isn’t sharing tales of woe.

And the response to this is to have a government budget that works out to about $8,000 per person. My family, five of us, therefore have a government tab of $40,000. $6,660 of this goes directly to the Department of Defense, and another $666 goes to the Department of Homeland Security. However, it’s not all tax-and-spend (or, in the spirit of modern Republican budget management, tax-refund-and-spend-anyway), because the Bush Administration is significantly cutting funding for the Environmental Protection Agency. In fact, the EPA is getting a larger budget cut than any other agency in the government. Surprised? I’m not.

The Whitehouse spin on this? According to the information on the Whitehouse Site, the purpose of this budget is to “help make America a more secure, more prosperous, and more hopeful country.” I just don’t see how we’re going to be more prosperous and more hopeful with this kind of crippling debt, personally.