Cap-n-trade, more porkulus packages, amnesty for illegal immigrants – everything that is tailor-made to destroy our country will be coming down the pipeline within the few remaining months that the Democrats have left in control of Congress

Taking Away the Government’s Shovel

By Tim Dunkin Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Well, it appears that it is well-nigh official – America is the next shovel-ready project. Having barely succeeded in pushing ObamaCare through Congress against the manifest will of the American people, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the rest are probably already preparing to ram the rest of their failure-generating agenda down our throats.

They’re coming, folks – Cap-n-trade, more porkulus packages, amnesty for illegal immigrants – everything that is tailor-made to destroy our country will be coming down the pipeline within the few remaining months that the Democrats have left in control of Congress. Yessiree, the shovels of dirt are starting to rain down on the casket of America as we speak.

As bad as the taxes, the purchase mandates, and the rest are, probably the single worst thing that Obama and Co. are doing to our nation, from an economic standpoint at least, is the tremendous debt that they are accruing via the record-breaking spending, and the borrowing to finance that spending. Debt is singularly noxious and destructive to financial well-being, whether personal or national. This is because debt does not merely represent money that must be paid back. It represents money that must be paid back, with interest, and with no guarantee that the means to pay it back will be available in the future. Our government borrows the money to pay for the multi-trillion dollar budgets it is operating under. This money will have to be paid back eventually – not just the principal, but the interest as well. Like bonds (against which I always reflexively vote), government debt is simply deferred taxation – eventually the funds will need to be raised to pay for more than we borrowed today. And we, as a nation, have no guarantee that we’re going to be able to afford the payments to service that debt decades down the line. We don’t know that we’re going to leave our children and grandchildren with a nation even capable of keeping itself out of hock to the Chinese.

So what can we do? Let us suppose that a set of miracles occur over the next three years. Let us imagine that Congress is taken over in 2010 by genuine conservative Republicans (I don’t mean the RINO, squish, go-along-to-get-along kinds), and a genuine conservative Republican defeats Obama in 2012. The government is completely in the hands of Reaganites, for the first time in living memory. What then? How can we, and they as our elected officials, extricate us out of our current mess?

Well, the first and immediate action must be to take away the government’s shovel, to keep it from digging us further and further in. When you are deep in debt, the obvious starting point is to stop doing the things you are doing that are putting you in debt. Reduce spending. Delete all of the budget-busters that have been added by both Democrats and Republicans over the past decade – ObamaCare, SCHIP, Medicare prescription drug subsidies, what remains of TARP and Porkulus, etc. Balance the budget. Make sure that our outlays are less than or equal to our inlays. The essence of the skyrocketing debt is that each year, the sum total of our expenditures exceeds the sum total of our revenues by a certain amount. This amount must be made up for with borrowing against the credit of the United States. That, in turn, begins to generate interest payment at a set percentage, based upon our nation’s credit rating, among other things. As our debt has gone stratospheric, our credit rating is in danger of being reduced, which will make it that much more expensive, from an interest perspective, to take out new debt. It’s a vicious cycle; it’s the financial equivalent of digging yourself further down in a hole. It’s not hard to figure out how to begin fixing this problem, though it requires more fiscal discipline than most of our Congress has hithertofore managed to come up with. It must be done, however.

So how do we balance the budget? One problem is that, despite the public perception, “discretionary spendingâ€