The whole aim of practical politics is
to keep the populace alarmed (and hence
clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it
with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.
Congress -- the body that went for years without finding it necessary or being able to adopt a budget -- is stampeding or being stampeded toward lifting the government's debt ceiling . . . something that we are being told absolutely must be done by August 2.
Consider, if you will, that every significant ill conceived Obama backed measure that has been enacted into law has been passed hastily, before it could be carefully examined and considered, to meet similar arbitrary deadlines. Remember the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Stimulus package (and all those shovel ready projects), Obamacare?
There are lessons in those examples:
* The urgency isn't real, and
* Legislating (like marrying) in haste leads to repenting at leisure.
As has been noted on this blog previously, no increase in the government's indebtedness would be necessary were it to curtail its spending to no more than it takes in.
New debt could be incurred to retire existing debt as it becomes due, dollar for dollar with no increase. And contrary to all the scare talk, the government has ample funds to meet its current Social Security and other obligations.
The push is on to permit the federal debt to soar to fund all the new and additional things that the ruling class wants the government to do at the expense of future generations.
The ruling political elite and its usually coterie of statist supporters want to alarm the public, to induce panic, and to create a stampede to lift the government debt ceiling supposedly to avert the fictitious looming catastrophe but actually to enable it to continue to increase its profligate spending and expansion.
Fortunately, we have among us well educated individuals with cool heads in which rational thought takes place. One such individual is the eminent John Lott who dissects the debt ceiling myths in this analytical essay.
As for the rest of us, we would do well to (i) recall predictions of catastrophes that never occurred -- a global cooling crisis just a few decades ago, the population/mass starvation disaster that was supposed to follow it (emulating Malthus centuries earlier), all the nutty end-of-the-world pronouncements by deranged clergymen, the now exploded global warming disaster forecasts, and even L.A.'s Carmageddon, and (ii) keep in mind the astute observation of Henry L. Mencken quoted at the beginning of this post.
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