The Community Organizer On The Debt Ceiling

            “In the year 2000, the government had a budget surplus. But, instead of using it to pay off our debt, the money was spent on trillions of dollars in new tax cuts.” [Emphasis supplied.]

            These words of President Obama expressed without emphasis at the very beginning of his address to the nation last night were overlooked by every commentator, news analyst, and talking head by whom I was assaulted immediately after the speech. 

            I do not know why this was so. These words reveal more about the problems we as a people confront than almost any others uttered by a politician this year.

            Think about it. A supposedly intelligent President in a nationally televised address articulated a twisted vision of federal revenue that conflates tax cuts with federal spending. This is truly stunning. What’s worse is that he could do so using Orwellian doublespeak, blithely uttering these words in the ordinary course. Worst of all is that the professional political class (in which I include the punditocracy, Left and Right) were apparently so inured to the concept that not a single talking head or commentator challenged the President on it.

            Let’s deconstruct the italicized language. For starters, any budget surplus consists of your money. It was, after all, extracted from you by a confiscatory and pornographically complex tax code favoring the rich, the powerful, and the dishonest. The decision to return some of that money to its rightful owners (i.e., the American taxpayers) in the form of tax cuts is only proper. A surplus, by definition, means that the government took more from the people than was necessary. Put another way, the taxpayer was overcharged for the cost of government for that tax period. The only thing for a just government to do is to pay the money back.

            But in the minds of caviar collectivists and Beltway habitués like President Obama, the repatriation of money to the taxpayer in the form of tax relief is the equivalent of spending the money on the Department of Education, or on the Department of Agriculture, or on legislative "fact-finding trips" and other junkets, or on earmarks like the $13.5M spent on the “World Toilet Summit” in Belfast, Ireland. (Think I’m joking? See for yourself: http://www.tnr.com/slideshow/politics/79332/crazy-earmarks?7)

            It is a natural human impulse to cling to the familiar, to ideas, habits, and practices in which large numbers of people are invested politically, intellectually, and economically. The establishment alarmists have by now already succeeded in stampeding even Speaker Boehner to embrace the view that unless the debt ceiling is raised, the sky (which to our “leaders” has always represented the limit of the debt they are willing to assume) will fall. So expect, yet again, some sort of unholy “deal” that continues to impoverish us and our children and grandchildren, even as it sustains the Beltway nabobs in a lifestyle (Cadillac health care, cushy pensions, hot and cold running perquisites) that you and I pay for but in which we do not share. 

But had I plenipotentiary power, there would be a lowering, not a raising, of the debt ceiling, even if the whole Temple of Doom came tumbling down as a result. Then we could build it back up again, as free people.