What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (16 page)

Ryan’s budget sought to empower individuals through increased choice and less government involvement. It also aimed to save those very entitlement programs from extinction. In fact, Rick Foster, the chief actuary of Medicare, endorsed the Ryan plan as the best way to save Medicare from insolvency.

The Democrats reacted in typical Drama Queen fashion. “Hands off my Medicare!” shrieked former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as she led the charge against the Ryan plan. “Dead on arrival” was another one of her clever retorts. The problem is that Ryan and his plan’s supporters are operating on the level of logic, reality, and American values, while the kooks are operating on the level of thug redistributionism. If any of their redistributive pillars were dismantled and turned into empowerment vehicles for the individual rather than the government, a major part of their socialist superstructure would collapse. They could not allow it.

On April 15, 2011, the House passed the Ryan budget 235 to 193. No Democrats voted for it, and only four Republicans voted against it. One month later, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid saw to it that it died in the Senate by a vote of 57 to 40.

Republicans have been a bit politically schizophrenic as they deal with the new fiscal austerity demands from the people. While they went along with the weak 2011 budget deal and punted on the debt-ceiling deal, they also voted resoundingly for the Ryan plan, which would have dealt responsibly with both immediate and longer-term budget challenges by encouraging growth and restructuring existing programs in order to salvage them. Many Republicans argue that they require majorities in the Congress as well as control of the White House in order to advance these reforms. That’s a fair argument. But it would have been nice to have seen a greater consistency from them as they fought the early battles for real spending cuts, when the Tea Party wind at their backs was at its strongest.

Because they didn’t hold the line early, Obama moved even more shamelessly to ratchet up spending. In early September 2011, just five weeks after agreeing to some minuscule cuts and restraints on spending as part of the debt-ceiling deal and presiding over the first humiliating downgrade of the nation’s debt, Obama summoned a joint session of Congress to call for
another
half trillion dollars for redistribution under the guise of a “jobs bill.” Two weeks prior to Obama’s announcement, Democratic representative Maxine Waters had expressed her desire for a $1 trillion spending package. Obama must have welcomed that statement because it made his call for half a trillion dollars seem reasonable.

Obama then began to claim that his latest spending extravaganzas would “be paid for,” but by that he meant with nearly $2 trillion in tax hikes. The logistics of deficit and debt reduction would be conveniently punted to a deficit “supercommittee,” which didn’t even make it to the usual last-minute, hair-on-fire phase of congressional panic. It just petered out, after Republicans indicated a willingness to give on revenue increases but Democrats refused to give an inch on their pledge to raise taxes by over $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the Obama Spending Bus rolled on, with Obama proposing yet another $3.8 trillion budget for 2013 with no restraint in sight.

Obama did not make a series of rookie mistakes when he demanded ever more spending. His objective has always been clear: to spend as much money as possible in order to “remake America” by essentially bankrupting her, driving down her currency, and stoking class envy as a way to generate social upheaval. An economically weakened America would more easily fold into redistributive policies. An economically crippled America would be less likely to exert hard power on the world stage, thereby allowing a redirection of necessary funds to the domestic redistributionist dream—and to the global redistributionist dream as well.

In a spasm of leftist honesty, Obama once said, “At some point, you’ve made enough money.” By that, he meant that the leftists, as the vanguards of social and economic “justice,” will determine which of your assets, income, and property shall be yours and which shall be turned over to the state for redistributive purposes. This is exactly the kind of capriciousness of an all-powerful state against which the Founders built protections. But the leftists have found ways around those defenses because the Founders never anticipated the rise of this particular brand of kook.

There always was a clear method to Obama’s spending madness. The staggering spending was designed not to help the economy but to rapidly expand the welfare state so that it would be extraordinarily difficult to ever roll it back. The Mad Hatter in the White House is not mad at all, but a quite sane and ruthless operative who knows exactly what he is doing.

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

—Herbert Hoover, January 16, 1936

When President Hoover made that statement, the gross national debt was $34 billion. Today the federal government spends that amount in three days.

The United States National Debt Clock, located on the Web at www.USDebtClock.org, should come with a warning sign like the kind you see before you board the Space Mountain roller coaster at Disney World:
WARNING! FOR SAFETY, YOU SHOULD BE IN GOOD HEALTH AND FREE FROM HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE, HEART, BACK OR NECK PROBLEMS, MOTION SICKNESS OR OTHER CONDITIONS THAT COULD BE AGGRAVATED BY THIS ADVENTURE. EXPECTANT MOTHERS SHOULD NOT RIDE
. The faint of heart should not look at the National Debt Clock. Every other American should look at it daily. The speed with which the debt numbers fly upward is both fascinating and horrifying: fascinating that any government could spend so much money and accrue such staggering debt so fast, and horrifying because it’s
our
government spinning those numbers ever higher.

It used to be that the word “trillion” was used only in astronomy, and even there, it was used only sparingly. When the late astronomer Carl Sagan wanted to invoke enormity, as in countless stars or light-years in distance, he would use the ambiguous term “billions and billions,” and it sounded so huge. Today, our national debt is hurtling though time and space toward $17 trillion, or 17,000 billions. One trillion seconds ago, much of North America was still deeply buried in the Ice Age. Today Sagan’s phrase—“billions and billions”—sounds positively quaint.

On June 9, 2009, just a few months after Obama’s inauguration, the Associated Press ran an article that unwittingly revealed the new president’s attitude, strategy, and objective regarding massive new spending and the inevitably huge new debt. The headline: “Obama: It’s OK to Borrow to Pay for Health Care.” The tagline of the story: “Obama—proposed budget rules allow deficits to swell to pay for health care plan.” The piece then laid out Obama’s position. “President Barack Obama … proposed budget rules that would allow Congress
to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt
to jump-start the administration’s emerging health care overhaul.... It would carve out about
$2.5 trillion worth of exemptions for Obama’s priorities
over the next decade. His health care reform plan also would get
a green light to run big deficits
in its early years.” (Emphasis added.)

All of the bank-breaking spending was designed to undercut the nation’s economic strength and its global exceptionalism. If the United States had both a crippled economy and a crippling debt, it could no longer retain its status as the global number one. And the kooks intend to do the takedown, mainly by spending us past Debt Purgatory and into Debt Hell. And once we reach Debt Hell, Obama intends to do two things during his trip to damnation. The first is to give a high five to his old buddy, Saul Alinsky. The second is to shake down Lucifer for all of his extra cash, so that Barry can spend Beelzebub’s life savings too.

For years, the leftists registered phony “concern” about the deficit and debt to mask their true intentions: How else to explain Obama’s decision to empanel by executive order a “deficit commission” only to blow off their entire set of recommendations? Or his repeated claims to want to get the deficit spending under control, only to follow them with demands for ever more spending? Or his failure to bat an eye when Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt based primarily on an unwillingness to restrain government spending?

Obama constantly put on the mask of fiscal discipline as he pretended to offer support for things that would actually reduce the longterm debt crisis, such as entitlement reform and meaningful spending cuts. But as soon as the Republicans became encouraged that he might actually mean it, he backed away from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security reform faster than Snooki from a pair of sensible shoes.

At first, Team Obama and the kooks were able to get away with the huge deficit spending and exploding debt because they couched their policies in terms of temporary crisis intervention, and because it took people a while to realize that this was no run-of-the-mill Democratic administration. Because Obama sang a melodious tune of moderation during the 2008 campaign, many people, including those on Wall Street, assumed that he would behave much as Bill Clinton had in office.

Of course, the death of HillaryCare and the Republican control of Congress helped check the wild spending impulses of Clinton and the kooks on his left. And let’s face it: all of the naked intern mambo Bill was doing in the White House kept him from focusing on too many left-wing pet projects at one time (HillaryCare was his wife’s idea).

For Clinton, the deficit was to be reduced. For Obama, the deficit is to serve as proof that his radical redistributionist regime is under way. It took the United States over 190 years from the start of constitutional government to amass $1 trillion in debt. Today we add $1 trillion about every nine months. In 1941, our public debt was about $43 billion, which averaged about $370 per citizen. Today, with a population that has about tripled, each American’s share is roughly $50,000. And the cost per taxpayer is about $140,000 and climbing. You might want to work a little harder.

When Bush left office, he was rightly assailed by fiscal conservatives for spending too much, as he had signed into law a huge new entitlement in Medicare Part D and new federal education guidelines in No Child Left Behind. He left behind a 2008 budget deficit of $450 billion, in large part due to the initial $350 billion TARP payout—a onetime “extraordinary” budget item. In 2008, that deficit was about 3 percent of GDP. Obama blew up the annual deficit to about $1.5 trillion, or 11 percent of GDP.

When Obama took office, the total national debt was $10.6 trillion. In his first 945 days, Obama increased it by $4.247 trillion, the fastest increase under any president ever. Under President Bush, the nation’s debt increased $4.9 trillion, but it took him 2,648 days to do it.

The
total
national debt, which includes the debt held by the public as well as intragovernmental debt (that is, what one part of the government owes to another part), was an acute 69 percent of GDP at the end of the Bush years. Obama’s profligate spending has now pushed that level over 100 percent. (According to the Congressional Budget Office, the public debt–to–GDP ratio could reach 200 percent by 2037, assuming that the entire economy doesn’t collapse first.) The last time U.S. debt topped the size of the entire economy was in 1947 following the complete economic mobilization of World War II. At least then we had the salvation of the free world to show for it. By 1981, the debt-to-GDP ratio had dropped to 32.5 percent. And now, we’ve sailed back over the 100 percent of GDP mark with just a few recalled Chevy Volts and shrimp on a treadmill to show for it.

In just the first nine months of fiscal year 2011, the United States had already paid more to service its debt ($385 billion) than some 195 countries had in total annual economic output, including Nigeria, Sweden, the Philippines, Austria, and Switzerland.

Before Obama became president, the kooks controlling Congress were running wild. From January 2007, when they took control of the House, until January 2010, when the Republicans took over, the Democrats increased the national debt by $5.343 trillion. Under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, $3.66 billion
per day
was added to the debt. She was the sixtieth Speaker of the House. During her tenure, she amassed more debt than the first fifty-seven speakers combined. Recall with fondness her epic lie upon entering the Speakership in January 2007 that there would be “no new deficit spending. Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.”

Since Obama assumed power, the national debt is growing by roughly $6.6 billion per day, a few billion more per day than the debt Pelosi was amassing. Kooks always try to outdo each other.

Events such as wars and the financial crisis are extraordinary events that usually necessitate deficit spending; when the event is over, we know that we should address the debt increase, as we did after World War II. The kooks of today, however, have hijacked deficit spending and now use emergencies both real and made up to justify making the debt crisis worse.

As our debt has exploded, unfriendly nations have seen an opportunity to buy up our debt both as a relatively safe investment and as a point of leverage with Washington. We are now at the mercy of the Chinese loan shark. China is our top foreign creditor, holding nearly $2 trillion. If the Chinese keep buying our debt, in a few years the interest we pay them will fund their entire military, which will in turn be in a position to challenge us more aggressively. This is a different form of the Saudi equation: we buy Saudi oil, and the Saudis take our cash and plow some of it into terrorism and Islamic infiltration projects. The Chinese are not interested in violence, at least not yet. However, if they reach a point when our interest payments on the debt have financed their military amply enough to where they no longer fear us, then we should prepare for the Chicom version of the Trojan Horse to be used against us. But in this circumstance, instead of a horse left as a gift, we may find that a giant fortune cookie has washed ashore on the West Coast, and if one of those blunt-smoking munchies-lovin’ surfers bites into it, the Communist army could come pouring out.