"Everybody knows the boat is leaking ---Everybody knows the captain lied"
Leonard Cohen

W The congressional blather over when and how to balance a budget serves us badly, encouraging the belief that something is being or will be done, when in fact we are out of time. Not almost out of time, but completely out of time.

There are worthwhile things for which to go into debt. Infrastructure is one, the roads and rails and sewers and bridges without which we can scarcely advance. Capital investment is another, the homes and factories that bring long-term value, stability and economic gain. Occasionally it makes sense to become a debtor, as we did in the nineteenth century to build our railroads and invest in the farms and factories that made us a successful nation.

But we have come lately to accept the unacceptable, a level of constant debt that brings no return, not short-term and not long-term. We have become willing to go into debt for consumer goods, borrowed-against oil from the middle east to fuel borrowed-against automobiles from Japan. Debt for nuclear submarines and stealth bombers. Debt to shore up our weakening currency and worst of all, debt to service the interest on our debt. We're too much like the spendthrift who accepts another credit-card to pay down the balance on the cards he's maxed out. We're making as a nation, the debt consolidation loans that are the hallmark of a family in trouble, paying whatever the rate in a frenzied effort to keep up with the Joneses.

If, as an individual, you've borrowed all you can and run a half-dozen credit cards to their limit, you may have a large house and several cars, but you're headed for bankruptcy and won't be able to send your kids to college. You're headed for years at the bottom, perhaps a lifetime. We're running our country this way. It took the entire history of the republic, including two world wars and the great depression to reach a trillion dollars in debt. In a mere fifteen years that debt has risen sevenfold, approaching eight trillion and our politicians say we're okay, might balance the budget early in the next century, but only if we cook the books. Every tax dollar west of the Mississippi currently goes for interest on the debt.

Another nuclear submarine or bomber contributes nothing toward the growth of the economy. Sure, it provides a few jobs in the armaments factories, but beyond that it's a dead loss. We need a few for national defense, but we don't need as many as we have contracted to build. Even the Pentagon agrees and yet the current congress voted them eight billion dollars more than they requested for such purposes. This is a congress that pulls the teeth of social programs. This is a congress that cannot and will not balance its budget.

Money borrowed for bureaucracy and subsidies, for weaponry and interest on the borrowing, builds no roads, funds no factories, educates no children, cures no ills and deteriorates rather than improves the national wealth. The home that you bought in the seventies for $100,000 is not worth $300,000 today, it merely commands that price because the dollar has declined in value by two thirds. The $3,000 car of that day is not worth its $15,000 replacement, it merely reflects what has happened to the value of our currency.

And yet in the face of that, our politicians today stand before us and promise to balance the budget and at the same time cut taxes. That's a lie and an impossibility, something for which they should be roundly booed off the stage of national politics. And yet it's understandable, for these men are trying to get elected to office and it's a proven method to promise both ends of the candy bar. The real crime, the crime for which we will see our economic principles dashed and our future hopelessly mortgaged, is that we believe them, that we elect and allow such irresponsibility and expect it to somehow indebt our way into prosperity. Alchemy is a disproved theory. Base metals cannot be turned into gold.

We are not powerless, but we are powerless to succeed by alchemy. We can as a nation, have anything we want, but we cannot have everything we want.

If we want basic health care for everyone, we can have it. But we cannot have a health care system that answers every contingency, buffers every risk and guarantees to preserve our individual lives, no matter the cost. If we deem that a baseline social net is a good thing so that we minimize the homeless on the streets and no one is forced to starve to death, we can have it. But we cannot have a society that balances every evil of poverty. Unlike Christ, we are unable as a nation to make the lame walk and the blind see. We are able to do what we are willing to pay for, with current funds. It's not a miracle, it's a system.

A deficit-financed government is a particularly dangerous government, because it will go to nearly any lengths to stay in power. It will patch any patch, cover any hole, borrow any funds and lie any lie to make sure that the disaster doesn't happen within the period of its own electability. The great power that we have as a people is that we elect our government. The great weakness in that system is that those elected are more likely to worry about re-election than the business of government. If we are to save ourselves, we must make that re-election dependent upon economic reality.

We throw them out for marital infidelity, we throw them out for their position on abortion or the environment or gun control or any of a number of special-interest infractions. Yet we seem incredibly indulgent as year after year, they rush us headlong into an indebtedness that will bring down the walls of our economy. In fact, we demand it, with the call for government to cure every ill, balance every social inequity and ease every burden. It can't be done. Government cannot solve our every problem.

When government is allowed to spend no more than they raised in revenue last year and not in the projected year, we will stop the bleeding and can then turn our attention to the huge problem of paying down the debt we have already run up. If we do not do it, it will be done for us by catastrophic economic collapse.

There is no magic and when governments run fiscally out of control, they crash, taking along with them the entire economy and subjecting their citizens to years or more often decades of poverty and rebuilding. It is a self leveling system and the only practical and possible time to get out of debt is when you are making money.

We are making money.

Now is the time.

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