22 March 2013 –
Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a budget bill
for FY 2013 along party lines, 221 to 207.
It calls for balancing the budget by repealing Obamacare and by other
hard, but sensible budget cuts. This is
the third budget the Republican-controlled House has passed and sent to the
Senate since Republicans won control of the House in the 2010 elections. The Senate, controlled by the Democrats since
the 2006 elections, hasn’t passed a budget since 2009, the first year President
Obama joined them at the wheel of the spending machine. House 3 – Senate 0. The Senate’s refusal to pass a budget
throughout two Congresses says to me that the Senate leadership doesn’t care if
it mocks its constitutional obligations.
With no budget to constrain them, our politicians have continued to
spend money like drunken sailors on shore leave on a payday Friday night. Unlike the sailors, it is our money, not
theirs, and we suffer the hangover. It
is actually easier to spend money with limited accountability under stop-gap
measures called continuing resolutions, which have been passed for a couple of
years now. In fact, the latest
continuing resolution that just came out of the Senate, and approved by the
House, will allow the government to continue to operate until the new budget
takes effect on 1 October 2013. But,
with no budgetary constraints between now and then, another $1,000,000,000,000
will flow out of our pockets and into someone else’s debit column. No wonder the debt has grown
$6,000,000,000,000 in the last five years.
No one in the Senate, let alone the Administration, has done one thing
to effectively stop spending other peoples’ money.
Six trillion is, as you can see, is a six followed by
twelve zeros. We have grown accustomed
to seeing large numbers expressed in a shortened form, as if the shortened form
will not alarm us as much: $1k; $1m; $1b; and now, $1t. Large numbers are incomprehensible to the
human mind except by comparison to other things, to known spatial or time references,
for example. Such a large number as $6t
,aka $6,000,000,000,000, begins to have meaning only when you compare it to
distances in space. If you were to lay
6,000,000,000,000 one-dollar bills end to end they would stretch 574,100 miles with
$3,135.34 in change. I can comprehend
the $3,135.34 in change; that is what our yearly municipal utility district
taxes are for our house in Houston—ouch!.
But the 574,100 miles of dollar bills would stretch to the moon and back
and then almost four times around the earth to tie it all up. That
is how much the federal debt has increased since the Senate refused to pass the
budgets the House has sent it and, thereby, has allowed the Obama
administration to act with no constraints at all. Add that to the $10,000,000,000,000 of debt
that previously wastrel Congresses and Presidents have accrued, and you have
dollars stretching, well, more times to the moon and back than any one man ever
has boldly gone before. Beam me up, Scotty. The Klingons are destroying the planet.
Why this exercise in hand-calculator adeptness? To show that unless our political leaders
recognize the debt crisis as the single biggest threat to the United States of
America’s sovereignty, our dominant role in the world, and all the security and
advantages that come with it, will soon evaporate. Our children being born now will no longer
live in the most powerful country on Earth by the time they are adults. "These are the times that try men's souls", means as much now as when Thomas Paine wrote The American Crisis in 1776. Like all staggering empires of the past, we
have laid the path for our own destruction, with trillions of dollar bills
borrowed and wasted. We need to stop spending and start reducing what we
owe. How? Our leaders need to recognize and then champion
the fact that government entitlements and giveaways neither create wealth nor
buttress our national character against hard times, or against the wiles of our
enemies. Instead, they soften our will
and corrupt our character, as leaders, as citizens, and as a nation. They always have; they always will. Therefore, the House budget bill, which calls
for balancing the budget with spending cuts over the next ten years, is the
only option extant that has a hope of keeping the nation strong and in control
of its own destiny.
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