Reflections From a Murky Pond

The Campaigner-in-Chief’s deficit might soon become a problem if it isn’t reined in very quickly and firmly.

No, not our nation’s deficit, which Obama has blithely hiked to previously unheard of and ruinously unsustainable levels in less than one term. His 2012 reelection campaign budget is his current problem, and it’s one deficit that he might actually care about.

The Obama Campaign spent more in May than it raised! The boy’s campaign and the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee, raised over $54 million last month, but they spent $69 million, creating a $15 million deficit.

It seems that Obama and his handlers run a campaign in the same way that they run a government.

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All cultures and peoples have their myths and myth cycles. These myths are actually one of the identifying foundations of those separate cultures and peoples and, by and large, they are both good and necessary. Only upon rare occasions do these myths become damaging.

Sadly, in America, one of our myths has become damaging. It might even be lethal to our nation.

Greek Mythology – It Couldn’t Happen In America

“It can’t happen here,” is a pernicious belief based on a self-serving and self-deluding perversion of American Exceptionalism. It’s a potentially lethally harmful myth.

Not only can what is happening in Greece and Europe happen in America, it is already happening. We just haven’t hit the bottom … yet.

California and many other of the several States are, essentially, as bankrupt as Greece and are being propped up by the federal government, a government that is so deep in debt that it boggles the mind – and they want to keep borrowing more and fight against any reining in of their profligate spending!

What is the scariest is that one thing really can’t happen here in America. The European Union is predicted to collapse very soon but that can’t happen in America; we have laws against secession and breaking the union. As no federal government that I could imagine would reduce itself, any attempt by the states to break the union for their own survival would lead to civil war.

The upcoming 2102 elections may not be the watershed moment but, if we don’t move swiftly, strongly, and sternly towards fiscal responsibility in this election, we will bring that moment closer – assuming it’s not here or already past – and make correcting the problems that much harder.

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Attempts to curb America’s federal government’s spending addiction go back to the days of President Reagan. He was the first POTUS to make a considered and concerted effort to starve the beast that was, and is even more today, the gluttonous animal that our government had become.

Sadly for us, it didn’t work – not at all.

This is not to say that President Reagan’s attempt rein in government spending was wrong or misguided. He approached the situation quite correctly.

Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.

The only problem was that approaching Congress as parent approaches their recalcitrant and spoiled children, while a perfect analogy, has the same flaws as it would with one’s real children. It only works if they can’t go running to their mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, or the neighbor down the street to get a handout.

While it was already proven in Reagan’s day that it was impossible to curb spending before reducing the government’s revenues – i.e., cutting taxes – the mistake was thinking in terms of Starve The Beast. We weren’t trying to starve a ravening beast, we were trying to starve Wimpy and Wimpy never starved.

I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Reagan’s idea was economically and logically sound if America’s government was running on any normal and sensical form of economics. He just didn’t understand or was powerless to change the fact that the government runs on Wimpynomics and that whenever it grows hungry it will cheerfully borrow money for its next snack and stick we, the People with the tab.

Worse even, one of the underlying postulates of Wimpynomics is that, as long as the government can keep raising its debt ceiling and as long as they can coerce people, institutions, and nations to loan them money, Tuesday never comes.

Wimpy never starved but we, the People will in order to pay for our government’s excesses if things don’t change. Tuesday is just around the proverbial corner.

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