Why bother with a debt limit? We've raised it 75 times in the last 50 years. What does a debt limit do? Who does it fool?
Which leads to the next point....Why bother with collecting taxes at all? If we're going to let Ben Bernanke and The Federal Reserve print an arbitrary amount of money at will, why not let him print up a massive $14 trillion dollar batch, bring in some forklifts and shipping containers, load up the entire press run, and send the whole batch to China and get it over with?
Then print another 3 trillion or so to keep the TSA crotch-gropers paid, and the Department of Transportation parasites paid, and the borders of South Korea and Germany and Iraq and Afghanistan and England guarded with our armies. Let's get it done !!
What kind of finesse about printing money are we attempting? The Chinese are dumping dollars as fast as they can. They're not loaning us any more.
....The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”
Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.
But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?
.... Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, “AP Economics Writer”: “WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.”
What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget “freeze spending”? And where’s the president getting all this money to “pour” into his “fight” against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn’t need so much money to “pour” away? Heigh-ho. Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life . . .
If unsustainable is the new normal, it should also be the new national anthem. Take it away, Natalie Cole:
“Unsustainable That’s what you are Unsustainable Though near or far Like a ton of debt you’ve dropped on us How the thought of you has flopped on us Never before Has someone spent more . . . ”
It’s not the “debt” or the “deficit,” it’s the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.
Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to “some collapse down the road,” you’ll be surprised how short that road is.
Here's Mark Steyn, on the Castro News Network's response to the Tea Party protests. This is long, but priceless:
The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else's into the same abyss. Which is why they've decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans' wealth and their children's future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it's AstroTurf – fake grass-roots, not the real thing. Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN's Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here: (A fresh coat of Whitening to the Cat Counters for showing this to me first.)
"Because," said the Tea Partier, "I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln's primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right …" (And then watch the microphone pull back so we can hear some Lefty talking points.) But Roesgen had heard enough: "What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you're eligible for a $400 credit?" Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as these Angry White Men are supposed to be, he'd have said, "Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don't want a $400 'credit' for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways." Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More's line from "A Man For All Seasons": "Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for a $400 tax credit?" But Roesgen wasn't done with her "You may already have won!" commercial: "Did you know," she sneered, "that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus? That's $50 billion for this state, sir." Really? Who knew it was that easy? $50 billion! Did those Navy SEALs find it just off the Somali coast in the wreckage of a pirate skiff in a half-submerged treasure chest, all in convertible pieces of eight or Zanzibari doubloons? Or is it perhaps the case that that $50 billion has to be raised from the same limited pool of 300 million Americans and their as yet unborn descendants? And, if so, is giving it to "the state of Lincoln" – latterly, the state of Blagojevich – likely to be of much benefit to the citizens? Amid his scattershot pronouncements on everything from global nuclear disarmament to high-speed rail, President Obama said something almost interesting the other day. Decrying a "monstrous tax code that is far too complicated for most Americans to understand," the Tax-Collector-in-Chief pledged: "I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interests." That shouldn't be hard. A tax code that put my interests over any special interests would read: "How much did you earn last year? [Insert number here]thousand dollars? Hey, feel free to keep it. You know your interests better than we do!" OK, to be less absolutist about it, my interests include finding a road at the end of my drive every morning, and modern equipment for the (volunteer) fire department and a functioning military to deter the many predators out there, and maybe one or two other things. But 95 percent of the rest is not just "special interests" but social engineering – a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama and Susan Roesgen. That's why these are Tea Parties – because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If the latter, then a benign sovereign should not be determining "your interests" and then announcing that he's giving you a "tax credit" as your pocket money. Doing the job the Boston Globe won't do, Glenn Reynolds, the Internet's Instapundit, has been posting many photographs of tea parties. (And I got linked by Glenn Reynolds Thursday morning ! ! ! Still can't believe it ! ! !) For a movement of mean, angry old white men, there seem to be a lot of hot-looking young chicks among them. Perhaps they're just kinky gerontophiliacs. Or perhaps they understand that their generation will be the principal victim of this grotesque government profligacy. Like the original tea party, it is, in the end, about freedom. Live Tea or die!
Yeah, some of the protests were sponsored by Republicans. Some of them weren't. In the words of one link to my Wednesday night rant, "Listening to Republicans complain about the stimulus package is like having a bunch of hung-over Frat boys bitch about the cost of maid service to their hotel room after a Spring Break bender." One other thing. The reporter in the video has applied twice for a job at.....Fox News.
It's Mark Steyn, not Mark Stein, filling in for Rush Limbaugh. Here's what you need to know about the guy:
1) He writes for MacLean's, a Canadian newsmagazine that is pure greatness. Some of his warnings about organized Muslim hyper-sensitivity got him and the magazine hauled in front of the Alberta Human Rights Commission - a group that makes kangaroo courts appear to have The Wisdom of Solomon. From a free speech point of view, these Human Rights Commissions are beneath contempt. End of story. If you're interested, check out this thread about a Canadian blogger named Ezra Levant.
2) Mark Steyn (not Mark Stein) began his career as a musical theatre critic.
3) He recently published the book "America Alone", about the U.S. being the last bastion of Liberal Tolerance. I'm only halfway through it, but the general theme is that a curtain of intolerance toward traditional liberal values - Free Speech, Women's Rights, Equality Under The Law - is descending over much of Europe and Canada.
4) The book seems somewhat alarmist until you realize that Canada now has the dreaded "rights" tribunals, England is drifting toward an acknowledgement of Sharia law, and, for the crime of pointing out this intolerance, Steyn's book will soon be banned in Canada. Because it is intolerant.
5) Hmmmm.
6) He's very funny. More of a Libertarian than a Conservative. Here's his website. Enjoy.
