Mac-Coleman

31 August 2011 –

The campaign for public office, particularly for federal offices, has long consumed the better efforts and the opportune moments of so many candidates, be they incumbents or aspirants. What is regrettable for the citizen is that these efforts and moments are supposed to be focused on governing, legislating, and executing. Combine the desire to obtain and to keep an office with the 24 hour news cycle and wider personal communication nets now extant, an elected official is not only always campaigning—long the norm—but far more visible doing do. We hired these guys and gals to do a job, but not to be in our faces 24 hours a day while doing it. Hey, we got lives to live here! Leave us alone, and do your jobs.

Speaking of doing one’s job…naïve as I am, I have always thought that one of the primary responsibilities of our elected officials is to create and pass a yearly budget for the funding and functioning of government. In fact, the President must submit a yearly budget to Congress so that Congress can bicker and harrumph and finally pass one of its own. It seems to me that the budget process is the lynchpin for the entire structure of functioning and accountable government. I guess I am wrong. It seems that the federal government doesn’t need a budget. It seems that Congress and the federal agencies Congress is supposed to fund can continue to govern, spend, and spend some more without the niceties of an agreed upon plan. It seems that fact that Congress and the President have not passed a budget THE ENTIRE TIME PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS BEEN IN OFFICE is the new modus operandi for the future of federal governing. Where have we been while this has become the norm? Doing our jobs and actually believing that our federal government has been doing its job.

I must admit that for the spendthrifts in the White House and Congress, such a method of husbanding tax and borrowed revenues does have an advantage. It unshackles them from being accountable to the comments, expectations, and coercion of those elected them. With no budget by which to keep an accountable score of success or failure, these so-called guardians of the public weal can now with alacrity throw tax revenues at whatever target may satiate their increasingly expansive appetites for power. Hey, why not? If there is no plan, anything I do is all right, right? Is this not liberty? Ain’t it great to govern this way? Not. Ignoring the basic responsibility to pass a budget creates an overwhelming power for those who use our taxes to buy votes and restructure the government any way they want to. Shame on you, Congress! Shame on you, Mr. President! You deliberately failed in your basic governing responsibilities and should be held accountable. If not passing a budget for three years is not an impeachable offense, I don’t know what is.

One of the consequences of not passing and adhering to a budget is the action of the Standard and Poor’s rating agency. I read S&P’s statement. In simple speak: The reason S&P downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating was because the USG has shown that it cannot pass and live by a budget and that it shows no indication to do so in the future. By ignoring budgetary processes in the past, particularly in the last three years, and by showing that it will continue to ignore the processes in the future, the USG has created a huge debt with no—ABSOLUTELY NO—functional plan to reduce it. I agree with S&P. I certainly would be leery about lending money to a guy who lived like that, no matter how much IOU paper money he could create with a phone call to the treasury secretary.

The only “balanced approach” to the crushing credit and debt crisis is to balance a budget and pass it. Balanced budget. Fiscal accountability. The solution to the crisis has nothing to do with raising more revenue. That only pours more money into the hog trough to make the lawmakers fatter. The solution comes from spending less and being accountable for that which is spent. A budget is the method to do so. Get on it, guys and gals. You are failing the people and the Constitution. Do I have to translate that into hog speak so that you can understand it?