Millions of low-income Americans face the loss of health insurance or sharp cuts in benefits, like coverage for prescription drugs and dental care, under proposals now moving through state legislatures around the country. -- New York Times April, 28, 2003.

Sounds like a domestic crisis brewing here with our faltering economy slowly stripping away the basics of a modest, First-World nation. And that is not even mentioning the crisis in education funding. Here in Texas the Lege is cutting millions from the budget for purchasing school textbooks. Universities are announcing layoffs to deal with 10-12 percent cutbacks in state funding. All of this because our Republican-led government does not believe in raising taxes to pay for anything - not healthcare, not education, not veterans benefits, not even to pay for our own wars.
Raising taxes, as best I can tell, is now considered to be immoral, unpatriotic and very possibly against the law. But never mind that. The federal government could bail the states out of a lot of their problems with current revenue projections - but instead the Bush administration is planning to cut taxes by $728 billion - or $500 billion - or $300 billion, whatever they can get away with.
Remember the last Bush tax cut more than a year ago that was supposed to jumpstart the economy? Oh, well, of course, it just wasn't big enough to do the job.
Columnist Paul Krugman recently pointed out that the Bush administration is touting its $500 billion tax cut proposal as a way to create jobs - 1.4 million is the figure they are throwing around! Only problem is that comes to $500,000 per job, when the average job pays just $40,000 a year. And that is assuming of course that cutting all those taxes will create those jobs rather than creating a huge budget deficit that will drive interest rates sky high and drag the economy down further.

On a related note, here is a link to a study that shows that Democratic administrations have been better for the stock market than Republicans dating back to 1928.