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More runaway spending -- this time its an expansion of NEA spending which is being promoted by President Bush. The country is borrowing money from China -- and billing my children at interest -- in order to subsidize entertainment favored by some government bureaucrat. How stupid is that?

Earth to Bush -- you can't continually multiply government borrowing and explode government spending without destroying the wealth of the country. This is the path every failed South American country has followed. And it's a path America will find itself trapped upon if Bush & Co. continue to pretend that the laws of economics don't apply to the United States. All I can ask is, what the hay is going on in Washington? And in George Bush's head?

UPDATE: Josh Claybourn weighs in, "#*)($&*@# ... The Bush presidency can be summed up with this fill-in-the-blank: "Bush proposes $______ increase for _____." And here's NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru, "And IT'S OFFICIAL. This president is willing to spend your money on absolutely anything--and everything: drugs at home, wars overseas, quests in space, and even the National Endowment for the Arts."

UPDATE II: So why do lefties hate him? David Berstein investigates: "Huge increases in spending on education and other domestic programs that are not even within the federal government's constitutional purview; a new prescription drug entitlement for the elderly; Wilsonian rhetoric and actions in foreign policy; Kennedyesque manned space mission boondoggles; clumsy protectionism; in its appointments to high-level positions, the most affirmative-action conscious administration in American history; a proposal to legalize the status of illegal aliens; and now, a huge proposed increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Remind me again of why liberals are so hostile to George Bush? Give him a phony Haavaad accent instead of phony Texas twang, a wonky college life, a less religious persona, and an attorney general other than John Ashcroft, and George Bush, in theory, would be a dream president for many liberals". And he concludes with this: :"it's very unlikely we would have seen the kind of domestic spending increases we've seen under Bush if Al Gore was president and had to deal with an oppositional Republican Congress. Sigh! Guess I'll enjoy my tax cuts and invest in Euro-denominated stocks as the deficit explodes and the dollar declines to Canadian status."

And more Bernstein: "Krugman and others figure that the "plan" is to starve the government in the far-off future, when spending needs will grossly exceed tax revenues, resulting in a crisis that will require the gutting of government programs, without Bush having had to pay a political price. I think the "plan" is simply to get George Bush reelected, and that Bushes advisors don't give a horse's petootie .. about the size of government, so long as they stay in power. And, contra Krugman, the odds that the huge increase in government under Bush will be undone in our lifetimes is slim, indeed--as with the Social Security crisis of the early '80s, we could simply have minor reforms with major tax increases, or, as with the current Medicare crisis, we could simply ignore it and spend even more money. "