President Bush was honest enough to tell us yesterday that our efforts in Iraq are going to be a heck of a lot more expensive than he’s ever been willing to admit. Honest assessments of the situation (in other words, those produced outside the White House) gave us an idea of how much this was really going to cost us, but our President was never willing to level with us. From what I’ve read, I don’t think that the $87 billion in additional funds is going to do the trick either, there’ll be another request for more money later. At the same time, President Bush started pushing last week for all of the temporary tax cuts that the Republicans have granted to their rich patrons to become permanent. Every observer knew that this was the other shoe that was waiting to fall, but those tax cuts had to be initially enacted with sunset clauses so that Americans wouldn’t fall out of their chairs when they saw what permanent tax cuts would do to our revenue picture. So now the President says that we’re spending more than ever (and that we’ll spend as much as it takes to continue the perpetual war), but also continues to attack the revenue base of the government. Anyone care to speculate on the long term objectives?