When I was a kid, adults (teachers, parents, nuns, etc.) used to tell us to eat everything on our plate, because of the “poor, starving children in China.” Well, that was quite a while ago, and a lot has changed.
Now China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt. And as news of Standard and Poor’s downgrade of U.S. credit worthiness reverberated around the world, China was quick to criticize the United States for our free-spending ways. China scolded us, saying that Washington needed to “cure it’s addiction to debt” and “live within its means.” Chinese officials concluded the following: “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days, when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making, are finally gone.”
The tragedy is, they’re right. Here we are, the United States of America, bastion of democracy, land of the free, home of the brave, being lectured by the People’s Republic of China, a Marxist, communist dictatorship, and they’re right! How did we come to this? And who’s responsible?
Defenders of the Obama Administration and the liberals (progressives) who still control the Senate have been spouting the same talking points – “It’s the Tea Party downgrade. It’s those crazy conservative Republicans who refuse to fall in line and just raise the debt ceiling, and while we’re at it, raise taxes to boot. They’re to blame.”
Or let’s just blame the messenger. Standard and Poor made a mistake in their calculations (which they apparently did) and but for this error, we wouldn’t have been downgraded (which Standard and Poor denies.)
Or it’s Europe’s fault, or John Boehner’s, or global warming, or leprechauns, and when all else fails – blame George Bush.
Now here’s the truth. Both parties have been guilty of spending too much and putting off the day of reckoning until some future date. And then the Obama Administration was the straw that broke the camel’s back, with its $800+ billion Stimulus, and astronomical Obamacare costs, and on and on, and now the day of reckoning has arrived.
As President Obama’s once-spiritual advisor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright once famously said, “The chickens have come home to roost.” We can no longer kick the can down the road. We have to pay the piper. (Fill in your favorite cliché here.)
The bottom line is, our leaders in Washington MUST stop the political posturing, and start truly cutting the out-of-control spending, or the United States’ best days are behind us. Now, I personally don’t think they are. I’d like to think that as Ronald Reagan often said, “You aint seen nothing yet – and our best days are still ahead of us.”
But we’re very close to being at the point where it’s too late. Perhaps the so-called “super committee,” of 12 Members of Congress (half Republicans, half Democrats) called for in the recently passed debt ceiling increase legislation, will make some headway in actually cutting spending. Only time will tell.
Or perhaps the recent downgrade will be such a wake-up call to Democratic Members of both the Senate and the House that enough of them will join with virtually all the Republicans in those bodies, to pass the Balanced Budget Amendment by the necessary 2/3 vote in each chamber, when it comes up for a vote this fall. Again, only time will tell.
But however things turn out, further excuses, passing the buck, or business as usual, are no longer an option. If we fail to act decisively, our future truly is bleak.
