Cronkite Has Lost It

"stmx3" wrote in message
...
I don't understand his use of the disparate issues of war and
NASA as a source for journalism,

Cronkite is trying to cover about 3 or four topics in one article....never
works.

other than his wanting to fire a
broadside into the Bush administration and these were 2 very convenient
canons. And what a brute force way to pound a little allegory into the
whole thing!

The cake eating thing. Well here's the deal. The central concept of the
article is that future policy decisions by the US gov't are going to be
budget-driven, i.e. things we would like will be curtailed by a lack of funds.

Cronkite is actually making an astute observation here. An unplanned war, the
stock market contraction, high unemployment, declining appeal of US debt paper,
a $500B deficit in a $2300B budget, and continuing deficits during the ten year
run-up to the baby boomers going on Social Security. NASA's slim funding is
just the tip of the iceberg. Ironically, the legacy of the first Bush II term
is that they are spending too much. At this time neither Bush nor Congress has
seen a spending bill they don't like.

Andrew Sullivan has an excellent editorial on the last page of the Sept 15 03
Time magazine on the subject, Mort Zucker has remarked on it as well.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/0...ion/15edit.htm
Editorial 9/15/03
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman . Editor-in-Chief
The funny thing about holes

My 6-year-old daughter has a little puzzle. What is it that the more you take
away, the bigger it gets? The answer is a hole. When applied to the United
States, it's a fiscal hole. This year, after tax cuts took away so much revenue,
our national deficit will be more than $400 billion. Next year, we will be in a
hole deeper by about an additional $80 billion. A recent report by the
nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office makes it clear we are not
going to get out of this hole anytime soon. The most likely prospect is for big
deficits through the end of the decade before we begin to see a surplus again.
While we're deep in deficit land, however, government debt and government
interest payments will double as a share of our gross domestic product. [more]