The so called “debt limit” debate in the U.S. Congress –
there is no debate on the floor of the U.S. Congress between contending
parties, and President Joe Biden; head of the U.S. Senate Chuck Schumer, and
all the Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, insist
there should be none -- is really a campaign kabuki theatre featuring the
following question: Should there be a debt limit on borrowing by the federal
government at all?
Democrats have decided there should be no debt limits. There
are difficulties in pressing this point, not the least of which is – Congress
has established a debt limit to force the federal government to adhere to
rational and necessary curbs on spending. The current national debt is about $31.46
trillion and rising.
The U.S. Congress, a political body constitutionally charged
with getting and spending tax dollars, closed any discussion on the point when
it established the borrowing debt limit. And, unfortunately for spendthrift
neo-progressives in Congress, attempts to carve a path around the debt limit
will be perceived by the general voting population as highly reckless and
irresponsible, particularly in the midst of a politically caused recession in
which the value of U.S. currency has been reduced by inflation, which is caused
by excessive regulation, excessive taxation and excessive spending.
It is not possible to talk your way around the following proposition:
getting and spending are casually related. The more you take from the public in
taxation and borrowing, the more you will spend. This cycle invariably repeats
itself – hence the need for debt limits.
Throughout the whole of history, the relationship between
the people and its governments has been an inverse one: The richer the
government, the poorer the people. Occasionally, revolutionaries with knives in
their brains kick back, as happened during the French Revolution, when heads
rolled from the guillotine, among them that of King Louis and his wife, Marie
Antoinette. As a mark of disdain, French revolutionaries buried the king in a
common grave, his dissevered head positioned at his feet.
Democracies generally do not run to such extreme violence.
In the United States, an informed public occasionally dissevers a president
from his position and votes in a new head of government, leaving the head of his
or her predecessor firmly attached to his or her shoulders.
National Republicans are prepared to raise the debt limit,
provided a swarm of neo-progressives in Congress agrees to cost cuts.
And so, here we are, as usual, in a political standoff.
Other presidents, even the inimitable Barack Obama, have in the past agreed to trade increases in the debt limit for
cost cuts. The Obama Republican-Democrat trade off called for up to $2.4
trillion in savings over the next decade. The debt ceiling was raised through
the end of 2012 and a special congressional committee was established to
recommend long-term fiscal reforms.
The result of the media’s passivity has been an open border,
the surrender of Afghanistan and a major airbase to the Taliban and China,
raging inflation, insupportable spending, and a kind of domestic isolationism
rare in American politics. Biden’s interactions with the media are much too
infrequent, and even his communicators are unwilling publically to answer
important questions.
Meanwhile in Connecticut, the state, under pressure from
minority Republicans, also has enacted spending caps – guardrails intended to
prevent the state legislature from overspending. A recent attempt to bypass
spending guardrails brought a stern rebuke from Lamont: “If you don’t like the
spending caps, vote them out, but don’t play games. None of these gimmicks!”
And the gimmick? Republican leader in the state Senate Kevin Kelly noted in a recent opinion piece: “The budget and
tax packages passed in the legislature last week propose moving more than $500
million in spending – with the possibility of going up to $1.1 billion –
outside of the spending cap.”
Democrat Speaker of the House Matt Ritter’s response to this
neo-progressive Democrat attempt to overleap the guardrails was disappointingly
typical: “The Governor may not like [the] approach, but it doesn’t violate the
guardrails. Is it outside the spending cap? Yes. Does it violate the
guardrails? No.”
The more often spending is moved outside the spending cap,
the more often the efficacy of the cap is diminished.
The “smart fiscal guardrails that have led us to the cusp of
the first state income tax cut in three decades,” Kelly responded, “ain’t broke,
and they don’t need fixing. Taxpayers deserve a state budget with significant
tax relief, which respects the fiscal pledges we have all made as state
lawmakers.”
Ah yes, pledges, like tax cuts, may always be revoked by
neo-progressives in the Democrat dominated General Assembly who have pledged
themselves to a getting and spending regime that requires them to establish
permanent tax increases and temporary tax relief, so as to ease their way to
re-election.
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