Trash-Out U.S.A.

Following up on Champollion’s post …

You’ve heard about Trash-Outs. People who are upside down in their mortgages (i.e., owe more than the house is worth) just mail the keys to the lender and abandon the joint. Sometimes they have a little party first, other times they just depart quietly, leaving behind trash and other stuff they’re too strapped, lazy, and/or disgusted to carry. Americans are nothing if not entrepreneurial, so an entire industry has grown up around trash-outs, as industrious people who don’t mind cleaning up other people’s messes are hired by lenders to haul away the detritus of these former homeowners’ little piece of the American dream.

Like moms holding three jobs in order to make ends meet, political prosecutions by a Republican-mobbed-up DOJ, and government intimidation of grannies sneaking across the border to buy affordable Lipitor, trash-outs are are yet another of the “uniquely American” phenomena that have come to personify the reign of Republicans and their idiot boy king, George W. Bush.

Well, how’s this for a Trash-Out?

Bush Budget Would Bring Record Deficits

The record $3.1 trillion budget proposed by President Bush on Monday would produce eyepopping federal deficits, despite his attempts to impose politically wrenching curbs on Medicare and eliminate scores of popular domestic programs….

Slumping revenues and the cost of an economic rescue package will combine to produce a huge jump in the deficit to $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009, the White House says, just shy of the record $413 billion set four years ago. But even those figures are optimistic since they depend on rosy economic forecasts and leave out the full costs of the war in Iraq….

Bush is leaving his successor an enormous fiscal dilemma. The deficit numbers will mean pressure to allow some tax cuts to expire, especially the 35 percent bracket for wealthy taxpayers, which will revert to 39.6 percent at the end of 2010 unless renewed. Pressure from Wall Street to trim the deficit may cause even Democrats to go after the spiraling growth of Medicare and the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled.

We’re already upside down on our national mortgage. So what’s Bush going to do? Suck whatever equity we’ve got left out of the house, borrow against it, and then blow the proceeds like a coke fiend on a three-day Vegas bender. And then after that? When there's nothing left, when you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another ... well, you've seen this movie before ...



Senator Clinton? Senator Obama? Even if this thing never sees the light of day, one of you will have your work cut out for you.