It's not just the title of one of my favorite Richard Thompson songs - it's also the theme of my thoughts today.

Since coming into office, Il Duce Bush has continually insisted that we have the best health care system in the world. All this time, I thought he was saying this because he was bragging about it, and arguing for leaving it alone, rather than moving to one of those nasty government-run socialistic pinko health care systems that all Republicans loathe (you know, the kind of pinko health care system that they actually benefit from themselves).

I read through the new budget numbers, and I now realize that I completely misunderstood.  He wasn't bragging, he was complaining.  And by God, the decider is gonna do something about it, by making sure that we can't possibly have the best health care system in the world.

If this budget goes through even  approximately as proposed, we're going to see drastic cuts to Medicare and health care services in general, while we continue to extend unconscionable tax cuts to the people in the country who can most afford to pay taxes.  All other domestic services are up for similar cuts, but health care is arguably the fastest-growing concern of many Americans.  

Once again we are seeing that the sympathy of the current administration is not toward Americans who are struggling, but solely toward those who have made it. And no matter how much lip service the Bush administration makes about helping Americans, we see time and again that the only Americans being helped are those who don't need it.

Where is the outrage over a growing income inequality?  The phrase "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" has always been true to some extent, but we haven't tended to make it public policy in the past.  It is now so ingrained that a presidential candidate who tries to make poverty and income issues a major part of his platform has been completely belittled in the media to the point where he has now left the race. I bemoan the loss of John Edwards from the presidential race primarily because he was the only candidate talking about this - and I think it is perhaps the major issue facing our country at the moment. The US is not a country that can continue to have a ruling class, and when the dam breaks it's going to be ugly.