A Little "Chin Music" for the Senate

   Obstructionist. Heartless. Defiant. These are just some of the more polite epithets hurled at Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning this week as he temporarily blocked a bill that would authorize $10 billion in additional benefits for the unemployed.

   Sen. Bunning, a former Major League Baseball pitcher of great distinction, was vilified for bucking even his own party to hold up the benefits. But the only U.S. senator (in fact, the only baseball player) to have authored a no-hitter in both the American (Detroit Tigers) and National (Philadelphia Phillies) leagues was trying to make a simple point: The U.S. government is broke. Any money for the unemployed will have to be borrowed or paid for by cutting some existing program.

  Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, have no problem with the former. It's the latter that they can't bring themselves to do.

  At age 77, the trim, athletic Bunning still looks like he could still walk in from the bullpen in the 8th or 9th inning and get you a couple of outs.  In making a point about a $10 billion bill, he laid to waste the myth of the"pay as you go" pledge Democrats made when they took over Congress in 2006. "Paygo," as it is called, is as much a sham as the party's current healthcare bill. It's a sham because excluded from the paygo rules is the fastest growing area of federal spending: entitlements, or social spending, including unemployment compensation.

   So Sen. Bunning, for many years a thumbtack under the ample rear ends of senators from both parties, held up the bill to confront his colleagues with the fact that they are addicted to spending other peoples' money in an effort to curry favor with voters and be reelected.

   For that the retiring lawmaker was verbally abused by the media and his senate colleagues.


   Maybe the fact that he's not running for reelection in Kentucky gave Sen. Bunning the courage to stand up to the profligate spenders in Congress. Who knows. What we do know is that this can't go on. Under the last two Democrat Congresses the national debt has doubled. As a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) the debt is higher than it has been since we began paying off the money we borrowed to win World War II.

   Only one of three things can happen at this point: Taxes must be raised to epic levels to begin paying for all of this borrowing; Spending must be cut on everything from Medicare to Food Stamps to college loan programs to printing posters of the food pyramid; or, the worst but most likely option: The Treasury and the Federal Reserve must begin "laundering" the debt. That is, cheapening the dollar through inflation. Since each dollar will be worth less, the same amount of greenbacks will pay down the debt faster as well as providing more currency to pay for more entitlements. The perfect solution for congressmen who have no stomach (or anything else) for making the hard decisions on taming the debt and saying no to more spending.


   Jim Bunning saw this coming. Like the crafty pitcher he was, he fired a high, hard one under the chins of his colleagues. Chin music, the baseball players call it.

   Good thing for them he's retiring. Baseball players know that unless a batter back away from the plate  after the chin music, the next pitch is a fastball that somehow always ends up in the hitter's ribs.

   Just thought you might like to know.