Even in death, Osama bin Laden will be taking revenge on American taxpayers for years to come ...
... One of every four dollars in red ink the U.S. expects to incur in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 will result from $285 billion in annual spending triggered by the terrorist scion of a wealthy Saudi family ...
... Indeed, the meter didn’t stop running May 2 when bin Laden’s corpse slipped into the Arabian Sea ...
... The government’s finances also will groan beneath the weight of the Department of Homeland Security, the 216,000- employee bureaucracy created to protect Americans from additional terrorist attacks ...
... And small erosions of personal liberty, conceded in the interests of security, may yet deepen ...And, finally,
... Not since the early days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union threatened, has an enemy so bedeviled Americans and their leaders. Where once children prepared for nuclear war with “duck and cover” drills, Americans after Sept. 11 stockpiled duct tape and canned food ...While the prose here is unique among political articles and the numbers therein are stunning, the validity of the decisions behind these outrageous expenditures goes unexamined. The author treats the costs as a natural occurrence rather than symptomatic of bad, corrupt politics. Worse, the conclusion whitewashes the last decade by pretending the nation's middle and lower classes are not right now suffering from unemployment and inflation as city, state, and federal budget gutting hacks away our standard of living. If bin Laden hoped to bankrupt the country, the monies spent in his name combined with Wall Street's crimes may just well do the job.
* The title is taken from the article discussed: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-12/bin-laden-s-death-won-t-end-toll-on-taxpayers.html
