The new year begins where the last one ended, at least for the federal government's finances. They continue to deteriorate, with the pile of debt now topping $34 trillion.
As with everything in official Washington, it's all the other team's fault:
The White House was quick to blame Republicans…for the astronomical rise in the federal debt.
“This is the trickle-down debt — driven overwhelmingly by repeated Republican giveaways skewed to big corporations and the wealthy,” Michael Kikukawa, White House assistant press secretary…
Sure, why not? It's easier to blame the other guy than admit your own team has been just as eager to light up the national credit card…payments and interest charges be damned.
The hard truth that the political class doesn't want to address, and far too many voters refuse to admit, is that entitlements are overwhelming federal spending. The current crop of time servers has no professional interest in addressing these issues honestly (because doing so would likely cost them their jobs). As for voters…an issue that unites them across party lines, ideology, and inclination is they deserve to get what they think they are owed. Or in the case of entitlements, often get back more than they contributed.
Surely, though, the idea of a pile of debt that seems like it's ready to be measured in light years, rather than dollars will embarrass elected officials enough so they take up the serious business of rationalizing federal spending.
That would be nice. But it's also highly unlikely. As former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels writes:
A decade ago, an optimist could tell himself that a democratically mature people could summon the will or the leaders to stop plundering its children's futures, and to reconcile or at least agree to tolerate sincerely held cultural disagreements.
For a while after that, it seemed plausible to hope for incremental reforms that would enable the keeping of most of our safety-net promises, and for a cooling or exhaustion of our poisonous polarization.
Now, I'm grudgingly ready to surrender and accept that the cliché must be true: Washington will not face up to its duty except in a genuine crisis. Then and only then will we, as some would say, focus on the existential threats to our iconic institutions.
A new year, but with the same old fiscal recklessness, and same political class unwilling to act…except to save its own skin.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
