10 reasons your taxes are going up ... the war, Wall Street bailout

PAUL B. FARRELL | 10 reasons your taxes are going up | No matter who's elected president, the debt party's over | By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch | Last update: 7:32 p.m. EDT March 24, 2008

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Reason

No. 1: "Most Americans have yet to feel any of the costs of the Iraq war," write Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in an excerpt of their new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," in Vanity Fair. "The price in blood has been paid by members of the volunteer military. The price in treasure has been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for the war."

Well, folks, the party's over. Campaign rhetoric won't hide America's excesses, denial, incompetence and arrogance much longer. No matter who's elected, taxes will increase to cover massive debts. Greed has driven America's great economic engine into a "debt contagion" ditch with a recession, bear market, price inflation, and weak job and housing markets ... you bet your taxes will increase.
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2. America's new Wall Street welfare program
This one's scary. For the first time in almost a century, the Fed's bailing out the investment bankers, those wild speculators who got us in this mess -- bailed out while two million homeowners face foreclosures and increasing interest rates.
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3. The Fed's nationalizing America's financial industry
Bear Sterns is a symptom of a systemic disease. As BusinessWeek put it: "Financiers preached the free-market gospel and pocketed unheard-of sums of money, yet when times got tough they called for a government bailout."
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4. Huge resistance to cutting social and entitlement programs
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5. America's pork barrel lobbying machine
The Washington Post says lobbying is "Washington's biggest business." All those 35,000 lobbyists will be around for the entire 2009-2012 first term of the next president, and all screaming for government handouts.
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6. White House's free market nonaction policies
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7. Aging infrastructure: roads, bridges, water, sewer, etc.
Imagine taking that $50 billion monthly cost of fighting and rebuilding Iraq and shifting it to upgrading our own highways, hospitals, power, sewer and water plants. Dream on. ...
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8. Paradigm shift: consumer spending vs. consumer savings
In one generation our savings rate declined below zero ...
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9. Recession reality replacing arrogant optimism
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10. Now your turn, what's your top reason taxes will increase? ...