They keep digging

Another day older and deeper in debt

This weekend, the paper said the national Democrats had decided to punt the debt ceiling problem to the next Congress and let the Republicans deal with it. And the Republicans let it be known that they’d demand some cuts to domestic spending and social programs before they’d agree to any ceiling deal.

Once again, the two major political parties play chicken.

The argument goes that surely the Republicans won’t allow the nation to slip into its first-ever default, which would create financial chaos all over the globe, and ruin the dollar, and create a recession out of thin air, or maybe a depression, and after all they really don’t have a point about spending, since it’s all government money anyway, and that stuff can just be printed, or digitally created, and if Congress doesn’t spend more money then grandma won’t get her Social Security check and she’ll be kicked out of her senior assisted living apartment and she’ll probably freeze before Christmas. Right?

Nah. The two sides will come up with a compromise. They always have before.

Incidentally — which is what Nixon used to say when he meant just the opposite — we saw this in the paper over the weekend:

Fayetteville has launched a child care voucher program using some of its American Rescue Plan Act money. The city council last week approved $500,000 for the program from the $17.9 million in pandemic relief that came out of Washington.

Eligible folks in Fayetteville can get up to 12 monthly payments for child care. The payments go straight to child care providers. And the money will cover the entire cost of the monthly care for those approved — which would be low- to middle-income households in the city. And there is no dollar cap on assistance!

Not to pick on Fayetteville, because that just happened to be the example that we saw in the paper the same weekend the debt ceiling story came out. Cities big and small and in-between are rolling in the federal money. NB: Little Rock got roughly $37 million from the feds in its “rescue” plan. The school district in Little Rock even got $100 mil.

Incidentally, federal tax collections have hit a record high, climbing to $4.9 trillion in fiscal year 2022 (which ended Sept. 30). Even with the 2017 “Republican-Trump tax cuts” and the hangover from the pandemic, federal tax collections are up 21% over the year before, according to taxfoundation.org. Unfortunately, the government spent $6.3 trillion during that same year.

You know, if we went back to total federal expenditures during the last year of the Obama administration — that is, if the government in D.C. spent $3.853 trillion this fiscal year — this country would be on sound financial footing, and well on our way to paying back some of the national debt. Maybe all of it in a decade or more.

Incidentally, we don’t remember any grandmas being pushed to the curb during the Obama administration.

The two parties won’t allow a national default. They’ll argue and preen and try to make the best politics of the situation. As always. But they’ll eventually keep the country afloat.

But fiscal conservatives have a point. And they should make it.

Incidentally, this brings us to a project that we’ve been working on for a few weeks. An outfit called PragerU has created a host of five-minute videos, from a conservative point of view, dealing with issues from economics to government to foreign affairs to cultural issues. We’ve been given permission to link to those videos on occasion, when an editorial, for example, touches on a similar subject.

Today’s topic is the national debt. So nearby you’ll find the button that you can click to find PragerU’s video, this particular one narrated by Stephen Moore, an economist at Freedomworks.

We hope to include more of these videos here in the future. Because these kinds of topics aren’t . . . incidental.