The National Debt

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.

The State of the Union is Bleak

Wednesday evening, January 27, Pres. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. He'll have to report to Congress, his cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the justices of the Supreme Court exactly what he's done as president over the last 12 months. And the answer to that is not much.

For the record, here is the president's score card, January 2009-January 2010:

• Nearly a trillion dollars in "stimulus" spending that has generated little to no growth and has only transfered wealth out of the economy to government institutions
• A $1.3 trillion budget deficit
• A continuing budget deficit projected to aggregate to $6 trillion over the next decade, based on current spending rates
• A national debt of about $7.5 trillion, which is more than half the amount of our Gross Domestic Production, or GDP
• A projection that our national debt will grow to $15 trillion by the end of the next decade and will balloon to 67% of our GDP, which starts to put us in the class of third world countries who owe two-thirds to three-quarters of everything they produce (Like the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song, we'll soon owe our soul to the company store. But for us the company store is in Beijing.)
• A 10% unemployment rate that won't budge significantly for several more years

Congressional Budget Office chief James Elmendorf says we won't see a 5% unemployment again until 2014. That means we're not even half way through this thing. Pres. Obama, who continually mislabels the current recession as the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, is about to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Look for the president Wednesday night, in his typical graceless manner, to blame Pres. Bush in part for the country's troubles. But, as they say down in Pres. Bush's West Texas homeland, that dog won't hunt. Pres. Obama has had a year to turn around the recession he inherited,  and frankly we're going in the wrong direction. We have nothing to show for for the last year but higher unemployment, a bigger deficit, and a national debit, the payment for which will suck every spare dollar out of the consumer economy.

The president Wednesday night will resort to what boxing impresario Don King called "trickeration," saying that he's ordered an immediate three year spending freeze (Funny, how that brings us right to his reelection year.). But most of the programs lined up for "cuts" have already received healthy increases over the last year. These "cuts" won't even restore those programs to where they were before Jan. 20, 2009.

Maybe it's because so much was expected of Barack Obama that his failures look monumental. Maybe it's the election of Republican Scott Brown in heavily Democrat Massachusetts that's gotten the president a good old dose of foxhole religion-making him a deficit hawk, at least for one night. But I think the issue is that this presidency, by any calculus, is shaping up to be among the worst in history. Massive deficits. Monumental debt. Chronically high unemployment on the order of the European countries the president so admires. Lack of security. No cogent homeland security strategy.  And more concern for the alleged rights of self-admitted terrorists than the rights of the American people to travel safely.

Regardless of how the president spins it, that's the state of our union right now.

Just thought you might like to know.