Many pundits are quoting a statistic that our government is borrowing roughly 40 cents of every dollar it spends. We want more government than we are willing to pay taxes for. That behavior is like a teenager with his first credit card...financial disaster.
Why does the world enable this? Because they need a place to invest and the U.S., for all its economic sins, is still the safest place. Bizarre.
If loaning money to a teenager was the safest investment available, we'd keep our money in a safe deposit box or under the mattress. Since it is the U.S. government we buy Treasuries.
Meanwhile our political system features the famous "checks and balances," which we enhance by having one house of Congress dominated by Democrats and the other by Republicans. And our President is a Democrat, all of this a recipe for gridlock.
Democrats like lots of government and are willing to raise taxes to pay for it. Republicans want much less government and try to keep it from growing by blocking tax hikes.
Democrats have been good at fostering government growth; Republicans have been good at blocking new taxes. The result: big government financed with borrowed money, exactly what we have now and don't need.
Historically attempts to shrink the size of government have not been very successful. Still, the Tea Party is correct, we've got to try.
If we cannot shrink government then we've got to raise taxes and stop living on plastic. That will doom the U.S. to slow growth and economic sluggishness.
