| Nolan Finley writes a column based on a factual error, and winds up saying that if only we were right with God the nation would have no debt. It's supposed to be a story about an addict getting clean, of course, but that makes the metaphor no less clunky when it starts with the first step. Denial is the classic symptom of addiction. If the president can't recognize that binge spending is destroying the country, then an intervention is needed, and quick. The 12-step recovery plan offers the best hope of rehabilitation. Step One: Admit we are powerless over our addiction — and our lives are unmanageable. Spending has taken on a life of its own, with entitlements exploding seemingly at will. Admit that pushing debt any higher than the current $16 trillion will make managing the nation's finances impossible. The president must stand up and say, "Hello, I'm Barack. And I'm a spending addict."
Well, first off, there's no way entitlement programs -- which people pay into over the course of their working lives, mind you -- qualifies as "binge spending." We have known for a very long time that heath care costs were going to go up because the American population is simply getting older. That's not binge spending. That's a predictable increase in costs. Second, it's not binge spending that's pushing up our debt. We've seen charts on this. The two biggest drivers of national debt have been an aging population and unfinanced and economically worthless tax cuts during the Bush years, most of which the president sadly made permanent. What does Finley suggest we do about this? Step 2: Believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. That power would be the voters, and we must vote every single politician in Washington, Republican and Democrat, out of office if they reject temperance.
Of course, these are mostly Democrats and a few dead-ender moderate Republicans, so what's the skin of his nose. But, he goes on like this, with the only specific policy recommendation as a tax cut for everyone the federal government has wronged. He never says who those people are, but with Finley the person most wronged is usually the person who has suffered the mildest criticism but who screams loudest about being a victim. The rest of it is leaving stuff up to God, which basically explains the Republican platform on damned near everything from the last 10 years. |
