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.
That's USD 14 trillion with a "t". Coincidentally about the size of US GDP.
ReplyDeleteGood catch my observant friend. My mind was thinking trillion but my two index fingers typed billion.
ReplyDeleteWhat are your pachyderm pals thinking on the debt limit dude? They are playing with fire! Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus - let right be done even if the world perishes. Madness.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that the Democrats all seem to be suffering from short term memory loss. If you go online, you can find video of almost every single one of them saying that raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible. Not only are they intellectually bankrupt but they have a difficult time with the truth. Now that they have added trillions to the national debt, suddenly raising the debt ceiling is the right thing to do. The only thing keeping liberals from being hypocrites is the fact that they have no standards so it is impossible to not live up to them.
ReplyDeleteFurther thought on your loose translation of the Latin: So you are suggesting somehow that the opposite makes sense? We need to do the wrong thing in order to preserve the nation? I'm sure that goes over well with the liberal cocktail party crowd.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I need to state the obvious here - political posturing and flip-flopping is the unique purlieu of neither party. You guys are however confusing a debt crisis (important not urgent) with a liquidity crisis (urgent and important). You're playing with fire! The global financial system is unbelievably fragile right now. Please just put the matches and gasoline down - this is serious! Act like adults.
ReplyDeleteRarely in a game of chicken, do you get a head-on collision. Someone always flinches and steers off. No one from either side is going to allow the nation to not pay its bills and 2 August is an artificial deadline anyway. If the financial system is fragile, it certainly isn't helped by the president's hyperbolic rhetoric. Both sides are playing games here. When the president says that social security and Medicare might not get paid he is either being disingenuous or revealing that those are two of the lowest priorities on "his" list for federal spending. As Chief Executive, he writes the checks!
ReplyDeleteLastly, how does anyone take Mr Obama seriously when responding to a question about all the shovel ready jobs that we paid $880B for, he giggles like a school girls and says, "The shovel ready jobs weren't as shovel ready as we thought." It's no wonder the financial world, political world, his own party and the rest of the country are losing confidence in him. What an arrogant amateur! I agree, let's be adults but we are kidding ourselves if we look to him, Harry Reid or Debbie Wasserman Shultz to provide the example.
If Michele Bachmann represents the "best and brightest" that your party as to offer, then we as a nation are in deep, deep trouble. She and her ilk are thwarting the best efforts of the more responsible participants in this debate, and by that I mean Speaker Boehner. She's irresponsible and she's dangerous. It's not funny anymore. No really! Somebody stuff her in a mail bag with a 10 year supply of ham francisco and drop her in Goat Court.
ReplyDeleteQuick BV, find a brown paper bag; breathe deeply into it. You are hyperventilating again! No one is calling Rep Bachmann our "Best and Brightest." That is liberal elitist lingo. All conservatives ask is that she be given a fair vetting in the primary process as opposed to the character assassination perpetrated against Sarah Palin and the teleprompter audition Senator Obama was subjected to.
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