Our politics have become so degraded, Washington so dysfunctional, that we no longer budget, we now stumble from fiscal year to fiscal year on extended resolutions. It is terrible that the debt grows larger, we conservatives recoil from the threat to unborn generations. But it is even worse than the looming reckoning: the onrush of socialism, the new thing that obsesses the Democrat party this cycle, is almost irresistible only because we do not budget, we do not make choices, we do not understand, by way of illustration, that universal healthcare and open borders is an impossibility because we can print money without immediate consequences.
To the public consciousness where there is no scarcity, no trade-off between taxes and socialist programs, no choices made, the appeal to balance a budget falls on stone deaf ears.
When leftists want a new socialist scheme to buy votes, we obligingly print more money. Until that ceases, the socialists have the weather gauge on our electoral destiny because they can always out promise us.
Here is a reply written about a month ago:
When the nation, a business, or a family shirk their responsibility to budget their affairs it generally means there is a moral breakdown somewhere.
The purpose of a budget for the government is to submit to the people's representatives in such a transparent way that the people's representatives' vote on the allocation of resources and the imposition of taxes can be determined up or down by the electorate. When our government proceeds for decades on continuing resolutions, the system breaks down, representative democracy is frustrated, graft and corruption and crony capitalism thrive and deficits accumulate into bankrupting debt.
All of this is made possible by the practice of simply borrowing money without consideration of the long-term costs to society and certainly to the next generation. This power to borrow money is unique to postwar America as the world's superpower and reserve currency. This, coincidence of factors permits our government to print money almost at will, to receive funds by selling bonds to foreign countries because we are the reserve currency and the largest economy, to avoid inflation by the additional coincidence of cheap Chinese goods to import, by cheap foreign or immigrant labor keeping domestic wages down, and thanks to the digital revolution keeping costs overall down.
For the time being, there seem to be no present-day economic consequences to running up a staggering debt of $22 trillion. There are no political consequences for doing so and there will be no political consequences so long as there is no pain. Indeed, the political consequences run the other way because those who complain about overspending tend to lose elections. Those who promised to keep the music playing tend to win elections.
