What? How can I possibly connect those three disparate items together in an opinion piece? Allow me to explain.
When I was a boy, I loved to read about animals and like many kids, I found prehistoric animals particularly fascinating. For the last several weeks, the debate about raising the debt ceiling has left me with a nagging feeling that I have seen this situation before but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. As I listened to the various senators, congressmen, Administration officials and political pundits discuss the situation, slowly an image from my boyhood began to come into focus in my mind’s eye. The more conservatives tried to make the case for fiscal responsibility and the need to reduce the size of government and the more their liberal opponents called for raising the debt ceiling and increasing taxes to pay for it, the more our dire economic situation reminded me of a drawing I had seen as a boy. Finally, I had an epiphany and I realized that the image that I was thinking of was of a woolly mammoth suck in a tar pit and on its back is a saber tooth tiger. The picture may have been from the stamp book of prehistoric animals I had or maybe it was from an article about the La Brea Tar Pits. Regardless of the source, I now remember how the mammoth appears to be slowly sinking into the tar and is obviously doomed. The saber tooth tiger is so intent on getting an easy meal, he doesn’t appear to recognize the danger he is in and one gets the impression he eventually becomes a victim of the tar just like the mammoth.
Now getting back to the debt ceiling. Our current economic situation is like the mammoth stuck in the tar. Even though our economy is huge, like the prehistoric pachyderm, it is slowly sinking into a sticky pool of economic tar - $14 trillion in debt – which will eventually completely engulf it and suffocate the life out of it. The liberal Democrats in Congress want to raise the debt ceiling so that they can continue to spend money we don’t have on programs that in many cases, we don’t need. Like the mighty prehistoric cat, they are so focused on getting what they want in the near term that they are ignoring the long-term fate.
Hopefully this is as far as the analogy goes. If conservatives are successful at getting our spending under control and resist raising the debt ceiling, perhaps the United States can avoid ending up in the “La Brea” museum of economic history.
