Debt crisis portends liberalism's end
'The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money'. Quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher.
Examiner Editorial
December 16, 2009
With its most vigorous advocate in memory presiding in the White House and commanding Democratic majorities in Congress, it's difficult to believe that the end of liberalism may be within sight. We base this suggestion not on a hunch or on wishful thinking, but on mathematics. The Petersen-Pew Commission on Budget Reform has produced a new report warning that "[o]ver the past year alone, the public debt of the United States rose sharply from 41 to 53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Under reasonable assumptions, the debt is projected to grow steadily, reaching 85 percent of GDP by 2018, 100 percent by 2022, and 200 percent in 2038."
Long before the debt reaches such stratospheric levels, the commission warns, "Fears of inflation and a prospective decline in the value of the dollar would cause investors to demand higher interest rates and shift out of U.S. Treasury securities. The excessive debt would also affect citizens in their everyday lives by harming the American standard of living through slower economic growth and dampening wages, and shrinking the government's ability to reduce taxes, invest, or provide a safety net."
In other words, within the lifetimes of the vast majority of living Americans, government as we have known it since the New Deal will become paralyzed, unable to deliver even basic services, let alone the myriad of entitlements that politicians had promised would last forever. Liberalism will owe its undoing to its blind faith that government could forever be the inexhaustible provider of ever more spending, more benefits and more prosperity, with nary a day of reckoning.
This report does not come from some gold bug or fevered disciple of trickle-down economics. On the contrary, it is the product of a bipartisan commission led by three former congressmen, two Democrats and one Republican. The commission also includes two former comptrollers of the United States, seven former Congressional Budget Office directors, seven former Office of Management and Budget directors, three former chairmen of the House Budget Committee and one former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Honest observers might quibble about the commission's recommended course of action, which includes general tax increases. But there should be fundamental agreement on freezing federal spending now. Officials must choose as soon as possible which government programs should continue and which should end. This is no longer a conservative-versus-liberal or Democrat-versus-Republican issue. It is a matter of national economic necessity and national survival.
washingtonexaminer.com |
