From the New Tork Times Editorial Section:

This is a time when we really need a strong Treasury secretary capable of
speaking up for fiscal sanity. We are about to embark on a 10-year period in
which recent tax cuts and runaway spending are expected to add $5 trillion
to the cumulative deficit. In my lifetime we will have gone from the
Greatest Generation to the Profligate Generation to the Bankrupt Generation.
Yes, I'm talking to you 20-year-olds. President Bush has called for
sacrifice - but not by his generation. He's passing the bill onto your
generation.

"The 9/11 crisis has been used as a license to spend and cut taxes rather
than to set priorities and focus our resources on what is critically
important to our nation's security," said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of
Goldman Sachs International.

And Congress has played right along, as have people like Josh Bolton,
Stephen Friedman and Gregory Mankiw - Mr. Bush's key White House economic
advisers. "You know that all these guys know better," said Clyde Prestowicz,
head of the Economic Strategy Institute.

There have been lots of strong Republican and Democratic Treasury
secretaries in recent years: George Shultz, Nick Brady, Jim Baker, Bob
Rubin, Larry Summers. But right when we really need one with common sense
and the will to set priorities, all indications are that this White House is
looking for someone even weaker than Mr. Snow.

David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Commerce Department official who just wrote
a history of the National Security Council, said that President Bush is
obviously "seeking consensus and homogeneity. But the system works better
when the president gets choices. If everyone is on the same page and it
turns out to be the wrong page - you're really up a creek."

The very reason Mr. Bush had the luxury of launching a war of necessity in
Afghanistan and a war of choice in Iraq, without a second thought, was
because of the surpluses built up by the previous administration and
Congress. Since then, the Bush team has been slashing taxes in the middle of
two wars, weakening the dollar and amassing a huge debt burden - on the
implicit assumption that nothing will go wrong in the future.

But what if there is another 9/11 or war of necessity? We're cooked.