I make this bald statement without knowing whether John McCain or Barack Obama will win the election. It doesn’t matter. Either one will have a huge and expensive mess to clean up, which means they will need to raise taxes and cut services.

• We have an unfunded war in Iraq we’ve borrowed money to pay for. We need to pay that money back.
• We gave millions of taxpayers $300 - $1200 “stimulus payments,” and every bit of that money was borrowed and must be paid back.
• Wall Street bailouts are going to be expensive — and once again, are being done with borrowed money.
• Our country’s basic infrastructure — roads, bridges, and the like — is in poor condition and needs lots of expensive repair work.
• Somehow, despite all the Republican claims that our economy is sound, an awful lot of people are out of work and in trouble. Are we going to let them starve? Well….. maybe McCain would if he was given a choice, but even the hardest-hearted Republican is probably going to want to help them (at least a little).

So where is the money for all this going to come from? Taxes. And perhaps more borrowing, which means higher debt payments in the future.

Unless…. and I consider this likely… we inflate our currency even more than we’ve inflated it during the Bush years so that we can pay off our debts with discounted dollars.

In the end, taxes are going to go up. And many government services to which we’ve become accustomed will go away.

Aren’t you glad you’re not going to be the next President?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.