Obama Policies Favor Fantasy Over Reality

Barack Obama just gave a belated but stern warning about escalating debt — a few weeks after he presented a 2011 budget with a $1.6 trillion annual deficit, the largest shortfall in American history.

Congressional Republicans are now crowing about reducing Obama's red ink by forcing some $38 billion in cuts.

Such supposed slashing means America will borrow just $1,562 billion this year rather than the scheduled full $1,600 billion.

The administration expects that someone will have enough money to float our $4-billion-to-$5-billion-a-day loans — either foreigners such as the Chinese, whom we are accustomed to lecturing about their illiberal habits, or our own wealthy, whom President Obama so often chides and threatens with higher taxes.

Meanwhile, shrill critics of the modest cuts claim that the elderly, poor, sick and helpless will be cast adrift if their government dares to trim its massive borrowing by about 3% — or just about 1% of this year's projected $3.7 trillion budget.

Obama borrowed more in the month of February alone ($223 billion) than did the spendthrift George W. Bush during the entire 2007 budgetary year ($163 billion).

Obama recently asserted that not authorizing a vast new national debt ceiling would be partisan recklessness. He should know. In 2006, then-Sen. Barack Obama voted not to extend the debt ceiling when he railed against out-of-control government spending under the Bush administration.

“Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” — Nietzsche

Deficit spending as a matter of planned economic policy only began in the Kennedy administration. Before then, the government engaged in it only in wartime. Over the past fifty years deficit spending has become the signature madness of the age. Its sharp, dizzying spike in the Obama administration could very well collapse the economy just as mismanaged debt collapsed the French economy in the 1780s, with similar disastrous results for ordinary men and women. Money had no value in 1789 in Paris, and the population was destitute. A bloody revolution followed.

Vast entitlement programs, gloriously crowned by the entitlement of all entitlements — the doctor for every hangnail program called Obamacare — along with the comfy ride for teachers, public employees (who enjoy unbelievably generous compensation compared to the private sector at comparable skill levels), and all manner of other government sponsored boondoggles, are coming to an end, either through sane legislation enacted to calibrate the end of the ride as painlessly as possible, or, less sanely, by allowing the immutable and implacable laws of cause and effect to operate, in which case a sudden collapse will leave the national economic landscape strewn with rubble, opening the door for Robbespierre’s American doppleganger.

Both parties and every American share the blame for this sorry state of affairs. We failed to moderate our appetites while sitting atop the world after the great victory of 1945. Sixty years of gluttony have emptied the cupboard, and a long winter is about to set in.

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