What deficit?

High costs of ‘care’

One of the heroes of my youth, Bruce Springsteen, has a new album out called Wrecking Ball, the central thesis of which is (apparently) that we should always take care to “take care of our own.”

Nice sentiments, surely. But given Springsteen’s extensive involvement in Democratic Party politics over time, the hunch is that “take care of our own” in this context goes beyond simply biblical injunctions to become our brother’s keeper or to give more to charity. The effusive praise for the Boss’ efforts from liberals suggests that when he refers to “we” what he really means is “government” and that what is being advocated is more of it; lots more, including more social programs and entitlements.

Such advice raises at least a couple of questions that, to my knowledge, Springsteen hasn’t sung about, and those praising him haven’t attempted to answer, first of which is how such a course of action might affect that huge number called the federal deficit and its even more intimidating cumulative consequence known as the federal debt.

At last glance, it was the very welfare state and its array of entitlements that Springsteen and his admirers want to expand under the guise of “taking care of our own” that was pushing us over the fiscal cliff.

Second, if America goes over that cliff—as all projections suggest it soon will—how will we be able to take care of anyone? Won’t the number of impoverished become, under such circumstances, vastly larger, and the resources with which to relieve their misery vastly more diminished?

Which is another way of asking how, if we do exactly that which the Boss and those praising his “moral conscience” want us to do, by what ingenious accounting devices or divine intervention do we avoid disaster? One would think that those seeking the moral high road would at least have to factor such considerations into their thinking, yes?

That we might even wish to move in the opposite direction has been suggested by Wisconsin’s U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the reward for which has been scathing denunciation from President Barack Obama, who has summarily dismissed Ryan’s proposal that federal spending grow a wee bit slower over the next 20 years in order to avoid fiscal insolvency as “social Darwinism.”

Having thus far put forth no significant ideas of his own that would make any kind of significant reduction in our deficit/debt albatross, and with apparently no intention of ever doing so, Obama appears content to savage anyone who does have such a plan.

Instead of taking “care of our own,” Obama claims that Ryan’s proposals will leave us “on our own” in a cruel Hobbesian world where kids will go hungry, our drinking water will get dirtier, and we will even lose our ability to forecast the weather.

When considering that the Ryan budget aims to gradually reduce government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product to about the level that existed in the year 2000, we are left to shake our heads and wonder how most of us survived the hell on Earth that was Bill Clinton’s America.

Indeed, given our dismal and rapidly worsening fiscal posture, there seems a much greater likelihood of starvation and dirty water spreading across America due to fiscal collapse than from any efforts to modestly restrain the rate of government spending in order to forestall it.

But for our indignant chattering classes there can be only moral opprobrium for those who point out that we’re about to go over the falls; all the moral plaudits are reserved for those (like Bruce Springsteen) prodding us to paddle faster toward them. They are the “courageous” ones. According to the most recent figures, the national debt computes out to roughly $140,000 per taxpayer and is rapidly climbing. Given this, “we can’t afford it” isn’t a campaign narrative, but a cold, hard, undeniable fact, one that liberals in general and our president, more specifically, seem to be straining ever harder to ignore.

What “take care of our own” appears to mean under these circumstances, then, is that we need to spend even more money we don’t have to grow a welfare state, which is the primary reason we no longer have any money.

One is therefore reminded in all of this of how easy it is to purchase a reputation for moral superiority when you can put it on other people’s tab.

How utterly upside down our moral calculus has become—those who advocate a course that leads to national bankruptcy are praised for their compassion, while those who issue proposals to prevent that debacle are condemned for their “social Darwinism.”

Apparently, in the universe liberals like our president and the Boss occupy, pushing massive debt onto future generations, with dramatic and certain declines in living standards, has no moral significance whatsoever, and, in the president’s case, leadership consists of denouncing anyone who attempts to solve the dire problems he won’t address.

So again, for President Obama and other liberals, what about that deficit thing? Where are your ideas?