The can't-miss formula for political success:
1. Support all tax cuts. 2. Support all spending increases. 3. When a constituent suggests that this is inconsistent, change the subject.
Hey, don't knock it. Generations of politicians have stayed in office by spending money we don't have, and hiding the inconsistency in the same bottomless pit - the national debt. Let the grandchildren pay for it. Or maybe their grandchildren. The debt, after all, is just a number with a bunch of zeros behind it.
The number is 7, and the bunch of zeros comes to 12. Seven trillion dollars. It's alarming, but it alarms no one, because it is also numbing. It's too huge for the mind to comprehend. If you started right now and spent 24/7 counting to 7 trillion, you'd never make it. It would take about 70,000 years.
The enormity of the debt is matched by the enormity of the chutzpah of those who have jacked it up beyond the point of human comprehension, cutting taxes while claiming they're "stimulating a sluggish economy" (translation: buying votes) knowing they will never be held to account while they're in office, or even while still among the living. They'll be long gone before the grandchildren become fully aware of the legacy of irresponsibility left them.
When you're flush, the best deal you can get is usually to pay off your debts. But even in the best of times, we have refused to tax ourselves to cover past spending.
The debt had yet to reach its first $1 trillion when Jimmy Carter left office in 1980. It tripled under Ronald Reagan, hit $4 trillion before George H.W. Bush left office, $5.6 trillion when Bill Clinton left, and has now passed the $7 trillion mark. Servicing that debt - paying the interest that the government must provide to lenders - takes one-fifth of your taxes. But you ain't seen nuthin' yet. Some economists see a tripling of the national debt in the next nine years, whereupon paying the interest will take more money than all the domestic discretionary spending in the budget. Half of your taxes will go simply to finance past deficit spending, without reducing by a single penny the debt that those deficits ran up. Your grandkids and theirs will deal with that.
The Republican platform on which George W. Bush ran in 2000 called reducing the national debt "a sound policy goal and a moral imperative." Well put. But only words. The president's tax cuts and record annual budget deficits have pushed it ever further into never-never land.
The formula for political success still holds: Support all the tax cuts and all the spending increases. The majority of constituents will love all the goodies without ever forcing their benefactors to acknowledge that they sprang not from finely tuned economic manipulations but from the labor of generations yet to come.
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity . . . is but swindling on a large scale," said Thomas Jefferson, long ago. His observation still holds.
Des Moines Register
1. Support all tax cuts. 2. Support all spending increases. 3. When a constituent suggests that this is inconsistent, change the subject.
Hey, don't knock it. Generations of politicians have stayed in office by spending money we don't have, and hiding the inconsistency in the same bottomless pit - the national debt. Let the grandchildren pay for it. Or maybe their grandchildren. The debt, after all, is just a number with a bunch of zeros behind it.
The number is 7, and the bunch of zeros comes to 12. Seven trillion dollars. It's alarming, but it alarms no one, because it is also numbing. It's too huge for the mind to comprehend. If you started right now and spent 24/7 counting to 7 trillion, you'd never make it. It would take about 70,000 years.
The enormity of the debt is matched by the enormity of the chutzpah of those who have jacked it up beyond the point of human comprehension, cutting taxes while claiming they're "stimulating a sluggish economy" (translation: buying votes) knowing they will never be held to account while they're in office, or even while still among the living. They'll be long gone before the grandchildren become fully aware of the legacy of irresponsibility left them.
When you're flush, the best deal you can get is usually to pay off your debts. But even in the best of times, we have refused to tax ourselves to cover past spending.
The debt had yet to reach its first $1 trillion when Jimmy Carter left office in 1980. It tripled under Ronald Reagan, hit $4 trillion before George H.W. Bush left office, $5.6 trillion when Bill Clinton left, and has now passed the $7 trillion mark. Servicing that debt - paying the interest that the government must provide to lenders - takes one-fifth of your taxes. But you ain't seen nuthin' yet. Some economists see a tripling of the national debt in the next nine years, whereupon paying the interest will take more money than all the domestic discretionary spending in the budget. Half of your taxes will go simply to finance past deficit spending, without reducing by a single penny the debt that those deficits ran up. Your grandkids and theirs will deal with that.
The Republican platform on which George W. Bush ran in 2000 called reducing the national debt "a sound policy goal and a moral imperative." Well put. But only words. The president's tax cuts and record annual budget deficits have pushed it ever further into never-never land.
The formula for political success still holds: Support all the tax cuts and all the spending increases. The majority of constituents will love all the goodies without ever forcing their benefactors to acknowledge that they sprang not from finely tuned economic manipulations but from the labor of generations yet to come.
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity . . . is but swindling on a large scale," said Thomas Jefferson, long ago. His observation still holds.
Des Moines Register
