San Diego – Oh how soon we forget when it serves our purposes… But sometimes there is that pesky videotape that someone forgot to erase when the agenda changed. And now we have a glaring example of it.
The year was 2006. The President was the hated Bush demon and in his evil machinations sought to raise the debt ceiling. The left was simply apoplectic. Senators Reid, Pelosi and, yes, Senator Barrack Obama each took to the dias and bloviated in soaring rhetoric how this was an outrage! This was, they ALL chanted, simply so we could spend more money but we did not need to raise it for current spending obligations because all of those had to have been approved under the debt ceiling as then defined. This was, they shrieked, merely a way to allow the administration to spend NEW money on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond that already approved, which they hated.
In fact, they were right. Congress cannot approve borrowing more money than the debt ceiling in place at the moment will allow. So every debt and liability incurred by the country at the moment has had to fit within the debt ceiling when the liability was enacted. And, sure enough, we have the revenue to at least service the current debt even though we do not have the revenue to pay the principle down or to fund new debt. That was true when Reid, Pelosi, Obama, et al rose to say it in 2006. And it is still true today.
It was still true in 2008 when Obama, on the stump, called the Evil Bush Demon irresponsible and unpatriotic for allowing the national debt to reach $4 trillion on his watch, to create, he noted, a debt exceeding the total debt run up by all presidents before him. He was correct. But that was $6 Trillion ago. And that additional $6 Trillion was run up not by the Evil Bush Demon but by the benighted Obamessiah, How can that be when he was telling the truth back then.
However, he was not telling the truth today or anything even close to it. He had to be assuming, (and with every reason to make the assumption based on the election results), that the populace is so ignorant and so burdened with short attentions that they will not only have forgotten it but those few who remembered will think they remembered in error, our Spender in Chief rose Monday morning to warn the people that if the evil right wing continued to hold America hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless some equal cuts in spending were added, we would fail economically, fail in our promises to the world, our credit would be shot, and we would no longer be a powerful nation.
Sorry Chief, that is simply a bald faced lie. And worse. Trying to frighten recipeients of social security and VA benefits is disingenuous because he knows full well that the payment of those specific benefits is protected by Federal law. It is more than disingenuous, it is sleazy and duplicitous.
And, Dear Leader, it contradicts your own surprisingly well reasoned diatribe against raising the debt ceiling for the Evil Bush Demon which, against all odds, actually caught you doing something unusual, telling… the truth. Well, some of the truth anyway.
Raising the debt ceiling is wanted and needed solely so we can raise our debt. Duh. Obama’s problem is that as a country, we do not take in the revenue to pay for the desired levels of spending especially when the leadership wants to turn us overnight into a Scandinavian model socialist democracy. But this is not a result of incompetence. I believe it is an obvious part of strategy 101.
If we continue, year after year to raise the debt ceiling and then borrow up to it so we need to raise it again to spend and borrow more, sooner or later that house of cards will come crumbling down just as it does to a family who tries the same thing. And then we have a choice. We can do what we are doing now which is simply push the day of reckoning down the line so our kids and their kids will have to deal with the catastrophe we are creating, or we have to belly up to the bar and cough up the revenues into the public coffers to pay for it.
The problem is then we will have to believe that a Congress known most of all for its profligate spending (and yes, this includes the mainstream Republicans as well who differentiate themselves from the liberals only be want to spend a little less and a little slower, will take that added revenue and put it toward paying down the debt instead of simply expanding new programs. You do all believe they will all suddenly be bitten by the bug of restraint, don’t you? I’m sure I do… NOT!
The only chance this generation has of getting the debt under control is to stop increasing the debt faster than it can be paid down. And that needs to start now. Will it happen? I doubt it. The citizenry unburdened by any real knowledge of the issues or the consequences, hearing only what they want to hear and even then only if buried in the speech is a promise for more stuff to flow down into the public trough, are apparently clueless.
Obama has an uncanny ability to avoid issues and solutions while successfully painting any who oppose his view as the enemy, not just of him, though that is bad enough in his eyes, but of the country, of the children, of the poor, of the minorities, of women, of anyone whose status allows the inference of some ugly label to be applied to his opposition.
Amazing. Sad. Maddening. I think perhaps we need the object lesson now rushing at us like an out of control freight train while we, in our economically and ethically broken jalopy sit here broken down on the track. Maybe those left standing, after they have clawed their way back to fiscal responsibility and productivity will, at least for another generation, remember.
Despite government promises to the contrary, there really is no free lunch. And this lunch is going to have one Hell of a bill.
N. DAVID KING's BLOG 