Federal “red menace”

[Hayden Collins]

This week’s federal budget talks in D.C. are chasing answers to the wrong questions. As individuals, we know you can’t spend your way out of debt.  It is not a workable solution for our government either, nor is the assumption we can tax our way out of debt.  Such approaches do not change spending habits, which are the root of the problem.  The questions they need to be addressing in D.C. are how to cut government, cut taxes and cut spending.

Finding the right questions is also critical because debt limits freedom.  The freedom to make your own future or opportunity is limitless – unless the government limits it.  No one in this country should limit the right to another’s pursuit of happiness, and everyone has the right to achieve equally under the Constitution.  If I am more capable of a successful pursuit than my neighbor, why would my neighbor hold me back or limit my success based on their needs – and impose on my rights under the Constitution?  And by the same principle, I will not limit someone who wishes not to succeed and makes limiting choices.  What needs to be limited is not my ability to earn, but the size of the debt and the government’s lack of limits in spending my taxes.

The current debt ceiling debates are a question of numbers, and no matter what numbers they throw at us, the shrinking numbers of the working – and tax-paying – generation cannot maintain the current size of government.  My generation and the next one do not need same size of government that worked for the “baby boomer” generation.  We neither need nor can afford the services that the previous generation came to expect.  That boomer generation – whose enormous numbers are increasing the “retirement” curve daily – was as much as three times as large as the current leadership generation.  These numbers clearly state that the current level of government spending cannot continue.

Proposals for government wealth re-distribution are not the answer needed here.  On an individual level, such a model limits my success, while it achieves the equivalent of taking a bailing can of water from one end of the pool and pouring into the other.  Government programs like this do not change the spending habits of the individual who receives the bail-out money, nor does it change their future position or condition. This kind of Keynesian closed-system model only takes money from me, and limits my opportunities. Its proposed dollar-in/dollar-out bail-out exchange model doesn’t work because if someone was to save the dollar, or invest the dollar outside the government’s closed loop economic model, then this mutually-reinforcing theory fails by default.  Its greatest potential is create a non-innovative dependency on government.  We have to end this Spending and Depending.

In the 235 years of our country’s pursuit of economic freedom and opportunity, we have produced more than any Communist or Socialist nation.  We recognize that our government cannot produce the required economic standards for the private sector.  Communist Russia is a good example of how such an attempt failed.  No dictatorship, communist nation, or socialistic nation has equaled the free spirit and innovation of a free nation with opportunities to follow your dreams and the pursuit of happiness. 

For the first time in our history, we are addressing a “red menace” by which we have never before been assailed: it is an enemy within.  The red ink of this menacing debt limits freedom and creates tyranny – not as the form of government, but tyranny will be the result of debt.  And proposals to raise the national debt ceiling that are attractively packaged as a stimulus infusion, with the federal revenue from my and my neighbors’ taxes poured out to “prime the pump” of a closed economic system (such as those in Communist countries) are irrelevant in the open international free market that our country is a part of – not only in their operation but also in their underlying assumptions about business and opportunity.

What we know to be true at our own kitchen tables, we know to be true for our country: you can’t spend your way out of debt.  The desire for easy answers and silver bullets overlooks basic facts – even the perceived “perfect economic program” unburdened by debt during the Clinton administration does not recognize the free market’s role in that success:  the phenomenon of the dot.com boom.  It was not the result of any liberal government economic standards or upwardly mobile debt ceilings. Business in the private sector – not more taxing and spending – and the ability for individuals to succeed are our last best hope against the formidable national debt that we already have, and which we must come to terms with and bring under control.

There is no successful federal budget strategy that includes living in overwhelming debt.  Those who would contest this are making the argument that living within your means is wrong.  But in our own homes and communities, we know that living within our means is necessary for our continued success. We need to evict the government from the cozy home it’s been setting up for a long future in our wallets.

In defining what answers we are looking for and how they will be applied, these proposals and these talks in D.C. are ultimately addressing the question of self-government.  This debt question is going to force the government to make decisions on the federal budget, and to correct its unbalanced scales of entitlement programs versus defense or many other programs in the current proposals.  You have so much money, so many bills, and now the decision has to be made which bills you can pay, and what you can do without. This is where the fight begins.