'76 Blog

(Centennial Fellow) A month ago, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank excoriated U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., for “sabotage” in the work of the “debt supercommittee.”  The column was vintage Freudian projection, the technical term in psychology for the left’s attributing to its political opponents its own slanderous behavior. (Who will ever forget hearing Bill Clinton whining hypocritically about being a victim of “the politics of personal destruction?”)   As I write, the Congress is again at an impasse, reminding one of the wrangling last August leading to creation of that “supercommittee” — an exercise in nibbling around the edges that may have been designed to fail, as it certainly did. I suggest the supercommittee came into existence only as a hiding place for Members of Congress as they voted to increase the nation's debt ceiling.   Milbank called Kyl, “cold and ruthless … different from you and me.” Those descriptors are inconsistent. Yes, I like being exempted from Milbank’s projection onto Kyl of being cold and ruthless. It was the height of presumption, however, to suggest fairly that Kyl’s work in preventing another compromise on the road to Pres. Obama’s vision for the United States made Kyl different from a great many of us.   About October 30, 2008, candidate Obama proclaimed to his supporters, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”    That had a distinctly ominous ring, given the identities of those few known to have influenced Obama up to that time (e.g., Saul Alinsky, Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn).   Sinister is the accurate word today in light of nearly three years’ experience with the Obama presidency, two during which Obama enjoyed the connivance of congressional majorities led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.   Some of us believe the United States of America to be the most successful experiment in world history — a nation exemplifying the exceptionalism so favorably attributed to it by the great Alexis de Tocqueville — and in no need of transformation ala Obama.   The fundamental transformation to statism sought by Obama and his Occupier allies is anathema to a majority of Americans.  There is now a bright line between two camps. Neither can compromise, one must win.   The statist camp of the left has a notable advantage: a visceral commitment to being governors (or dictators, as the case may be). They also have the allegiance of major blocks of voters to whom they continue to pander with public resources.   Therefore, those of us in the camp rejecting statism have the more challenging task. The road back to what our Republic must be is narrow. We simply must do all possible to keep policy-makers between the lines on that narrow road. Those fatuously wringing their hands over failures to “compromise” would help drive us into Obama’s statist ditch.  

  The congressional supercommittee did not have to be Superman, leaping over tall buildings in a single bound. The mission was more on the order of being lackadaisical traffic cops. See all those cars going 100 mph? Let's get the accelerator madness down to 96 or 97, OK?  Sorry, but committee members avoided even that duty. The Democrats wanted a ruinous, trillion-dollar, hit-the-rich-hard tax increase as the major part of a $1.2 trillion, relatively picayunish, 10-year deficit reduction in $45 trillion worth of corruptly tinged spending that threatens immediate crisis and long-term suffering.  Think of it as incumbency investment. Every dollar spent helps buy a vote from some constituency or the other. The rich have few votes, and why get serious about slowing down government growth when we can happily imitate the modern-day, near-collapse of Greece? We can also look forward to our struggling children and grandchildren cursing us as the most selfish, freebie-inebriated generation in American history when they have to foot the bill.  The Republicans on the committee were better. They at least favored some halfway meaningful cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the most threatening programs in our budgetary future. And despite the overreach of multiple pledges to avoid any and all new taxes, one brave GOP soul stood tall for tax reform simplifying our system, ending numerous corporate and individual deductions and raising revenue both by boosting the economy and grabbing more money right away through the revisions.  But no deal is not a new deal, and we're not going to be saved by the standby law that mostly skips over the entitlements, says phooey on a strong defense and makes it likely that George W. Bush-era tax decreases will be allowed to perish. That law, referred to as "sequestering," does allow some reductions in Medicare fees paid to doctors and hospitals, meaning health-care providers that do not drop out of Medicare or go out of business will make up the loss by scheduling more appointments, it has been argued. Don't worry about defense because we don't need as much as we have and there's lots of waste out there, some conservatives join liberals in averring. I, myself, think we still live in a dangerous world and have noticed our secretary of defense saying the cuts could make us weaker than in decades. While I am persuaded by experts that our defense structure needs reshaping to better meet current needs, I do not think lower budgets will accomplish that end. And since when does lowering a bureaucracy's budget do away with a bureaucracy's waste?  If the Bush tax cuts go away, the middle class will learn just how significant they were to them, despite prattle to the contrary, and if we get no leadership soon -- agreeing on $4 trillion worth of 10-year cuts in increased spending right away, and more trillions to come -- the recent news of a record $15 trillion debt will seem a sneeze prior to the heart attack.  Sadly, President Barack Obama, having failed at governing, has turned practically full time to the only thing he does well -- campaigning. He has repeatedly turned his back on opportunities to deal with the debt, negotiates mostly through the inoperable techniques of aloofness and lambasting, aims to please the crowd with dangerous, envy-mongering demagoguery, and has been earning the disgust even of devout followers, one of them being ultra-liberal MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews.  "He never tells what he's going to do with regard to reforming our health-care systems, Medicare, Medicaid," Matthews said before a national TV audience. "How is he going to reform Social Security? Is he going to deal with long-term debt? How? Is he going to reform the tax system? How? Just tell us. Why are we in this fight with him? Just tell us, commander, give us our orders and tell us where we're going." My apologies for the Matthews understatement. In addition to offering no leadership, Obama has even pledged to veto steps in the right direction. Many cheer, but more and more, people seem to be catching on.      

(CCU Faculty) President Obama’s proposal to increase taxes by 1.5 trillion over the next 10 years in the name of “fairness” is merely a smokescreen for increasing revenue to temporarily maintain what is ultimately unsustainable government spending.  As many conservatives have stated: “we don’t have a revenue problem; it’s a spending crisis.”  A massive tax increase is not the solution to this problem. President Obama is of the opinion that if he can just get some more money from America’s rich people, he can continue to spend at the record pace he directed from the beginning of his administration.  He is also of the opinion that the government has greater wisdom when it comes to people’s money, greater than the very people who earned it.   He is convinced that if government directs the economy, it will lead to a reduction in American unemployment.  There are three major problems with Obama’s view of economics and his plan to reduce the deficit: First, even if he could obtain all of the capital of America’s wealthy people, it would only temporarily suspend our deficit spending.  Andrew Stiles at National Review Online summarizes the limited impact that even a 100% tax on our nation’s millionaires or even a complete confiscation of the wealth of nation’s 400 wealthiest citizens would have: (1) The federal government will spend about $3.6 trillion this year (a rate of $300 billion per month), running an annual deficit of about $1.3 trillion. So, even if the IRS decided to confiscate every cent earned by millionaires in a given year, it would amount to less than half of the new debt we are taking on each year, and would barely be enough to fund the government for two months. (2) According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest individuals in U.S. are worth a combined $1.37 trillion. Confiscating all their wealth (not just annual earnings) would buy us another 4.5 months. So even a tax scheme exaggerated beyond the levels proposed by President Obama and an even more unrealistic confiscation of wealth would do no more than keep us going at current spending levels for a few months! Second, President Obama continues to argue that our wealthiest citizens aren’t paying their “fair share.”  Fairness is a subjective standard.  Nevertheless, when you consider that between 47% and 51% of Americans are paying ZERO in federal income tax (depending on which measurement is being used), that the top 1% of earners pay 38% of all federal income taxes, and that the top 10% of earners pay 70%, there may indeed be a fairness issue, but is probably that the rich are paying too much as a percentage of total revenues. Finally, the issue must come back to who knows what best to do with money earned.  I doubt that Warren Buffet has always felt that he was taxed too little.   While he was an ambitious young businessman, seeking to turn small investments into large gains, Buffet, like most businessmen, must have known that with every dollar he possessed, there was an opportunity to make more.  And in the process of turning his thousands of dollars in investment into billions, he would be making possible new businesses: businesses that hired one, ten, one hundred or perhaps thousands of new employees.  With each of these employees having new spending power that would have generated new economic activity.  And in some cases moving people off of government assistance; and, yes, creating new taxpayers.  Warren Buffet used to know that this is the key to growing an economy, reducing unemployment, and creating new wealth.  Unfortunately his sidekick, President Obama, never did.  Combined, the two are a danger to American prosperity.  We don’t need new taxes and new government spending.  We need businessmen like the old Warren Buffett to use their talents and their entrepreneurial energy to grow the economy, in an environment with will minimal government interference.  

(Washington Times, Aug. 12) Perhaps the most telling remark during the whole of the debt-ceiling negotiations came on Aug. 7 from White House consultant David Axelrod. Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Axelrod echoed a growing chant from the left wing: The Standard and Poor’s downgrade of America’s credit rating was “essentially the Tea Party downgrade,” he charged -- adding that the “Tea Party brought us to the brink of default.” What a shameful abdication of responsibility from an office which once was, as an earlier occupant said, where the buck stopped. Apparently not any more. Barack Obama, you’re no Harry Truman. This administration’s passing of the buck is even more brazen when you remember that never has the White House offered a debt-ceiling plan of its own. Who did? Well, the Tea Party members in Congress for starters passed “Cut, Cap and Balance” well before the debt-ceiling deadline. Even Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid, put forth a plan. Since the Supreme Court isn’t a legislative body, that leaves the Obama Administration as the only branch of government which failed to lead. Still, if you listen to no one but the media, you’d think that the Tea Party had done something malicious by forcing Congress and the White House to agree to serious spending cuts – exactly what S&P had demanded. The talking heads on the left – and even some Democrats in Congress – unleashed a flurry of criticism, calling the Tea Party “terrorists,” “hostage takers,” and akin to one “holding a gun to the head” of the American people. Most Americans see what the Tea Party did as something else: Taking responsibility. At least someone has to. Which brings us back to President Obama’s – via David Axelrod – disclaimer of responsibility. While in no way is this the “Tea Party downgrade,” those aroused millions of working Americans known as Tea Party have shown themselves more than ready to assume the responsibility that no one in Washington appears brave enough to take on. On our mountain trails here in the Rockies, they’ll tell you to lead, follow, or get out of the way. It’s time to get out of the way, Mr. President. That sentiment was strong when we convened a thousand delegates from 25 states at Western Conservative Summit 2011 in Denver last month.  It was not a partisan gathering, but there were many activists from the Tea Party, 9.12 chapters, and taxpayer groups.  They expressed disgust with the administration’s fiscal indiscipline and economic ineptitude, mixed with impatience for constitutional restraints on taxes and spending at the federal level similar to those that have served Colorado so well. As a force for renewal of our nation’s founding principles, the Tea Party is the most potent reassertion of individual citizen responsibility since the grassroots conservative movement of the 1970s propelled Ronald Reagan to victory over Jimmy Carter. The parallels between the two eras are clear: Then as now, the Washington elite were flummoxed on the economy. Some even explained America’s seemingly insurmountable problems as the natural result of a nation in decline. Criticism of the president was dismissed as a juvenile reaction to the only “adults in the room.” Because congressmen attentive to the Tea Party are only one element of one house of one branch of government, today’s heirs to the Reagan legacy can only do so much. But look at what they’ve already done. 2011 began with the president sending a bloated budget to Congress which added to the nation’s deficit. The presence of the Tea Party ensured that the irresponsible Obama budget was dead on arrival. After the debt-ceiling debate, the Tea Party has now shifted the dialogue in Washington away from job-killing tax increases to serious, long-term budget cuts that reduce the nation’s $14 trillion debt. In a city that considers budget cuts as akin to Armageddon and higher taxes as the Holy Grail, the Tea Party’s success is no small feat. The fiscal deficit is a grave concern.  But the worst pathology threatening the USA with terminal decline is the responsibility deficit, a “not me” denial syndrome which infects too much of American society right now. And nowhere is this deficit more on display than in the current White House occupant. We can only hope that 2012 will bring us a candidate who, like Reagan, wants to lead with more than just words. Until then, the bottom-up responsibility movement famously or infamously called the Tea Party is America’s best hope.  

(Nantucket)The 18th century English political sage Edmund Burke wrote that the vigor of any society can be measured by the “balance between its impulses of innocence and decadence”.  He further noted that when that balance tilts decisively toward decadence then “decline is steady and inexorable”. In the recent fulminations over the debt ceiling “crisis” one could clearly see if not innocence and decadence then certainly their counterparts populism and elitism vigorously battling for political advantage. The elitists were the usual alliance of Democrats and “mainstream” (i.e. left wing) media.   The face of the alliance was, of course, Obama with Reid, Biden and others filling out the chorus. The populist role ultimately fell to that which is known as the “Tea Party”.  This entity however because of its inchoate and evolving nature had no face or identifiable center, and in fact wasn’t even a party. This elusiveness created a problem for Democrats who tried very hard to attack the Tea Party using the “identify, isolate, and demonize” strategy patented by Obama guru Saul Alinsky.  Because the identify and isolate part proved inapplicable the Democrats concentrated on demonize, and variously characterized the Tea Party as uneducated, easily led, racists, hostage takers, and terrorists. The more restrained voices in the punditocracy described Tea Party adherents as politically innocent, naïve, simplistic, and most damming “unrealistic”. To the pundits realism is the highest good.  A realist is someone who never stands on principle, is always ready to make a deal, and worships regularly in the Church of Compromise. For years this worldview has profited the Democrats who define compromise as “you give me what I want, and I agree to take it”.  This approach resembles John Foster Dulles’ long ago description of Soviet negotiating strategy: “What’s ours is ours; what’s yours is negotiable.” In the recent stand-off Democrats defined compromise as follows: Republicans agree to raise the debt ceiling and taxes NOW; Obama agrees to discuss spending cuts and entitlement reform LATER.  The media echo chamber insisted that Obama had Republicans over a barrel:  Accept his demands or be blamed for worldwide economic catastrophe.  Even some Republicans believed this. Strangely, things didn’t turn out that way.The final “deal” while greatly flawed- at best a very modest step in the right direction- nonetheless utterly confounded conventional Washington wisdom. In the end it was Obama who caved, not the Tea Party.  Suddenly spending cuts- albeit painfully small were NOW.   Tax increases were off the table- banished to the land of discussions later.   In a heartbeat Obama threw his left-wing base under the bus, sacrificing long cherished liberal orthodoxies on the altar of his dimming hopes for re-election.  Additionally the Fear-Monger-in-Chief threw away his Medicare trump by including that program in the “automatic cuts” in Part II of the legislation. In the final act it was not the Republican Party that imploded but rather the Democrats as perfectly reflected by their 95-95 split in the House vote.  At day’s end the Tea Party’s perceived intransigence did not scuttle Boehner’s credibility as a leader, but instead was the Speaker’s bulwark in standing firm against the Democrats’ “sky is falling” rhetoric.  By the numbers Boehner commanded three quarters of his conference, including a majority of the Tea Party Caucus while a majority of Pelosi’s minions voted against her. That Obama recognized the magnitude of his capitulation was made clear when he signed the legislation- not before a fawning Rose Garden crowd with souvenir pens all around, but alone in the Oval Office in silence. Thus the Tea Party- innocent, naïve, inexperienced, simplistic, and unrealistic- had been more than anyone else the principal driver of the narrative in this American melodrama that ended better than most conservatives thought possible. How did they do it? David Gregory- host of NBC’s  Meet The Press- spoke for “pundits” everywhere, when he addressed a mostly liberal and largely baffled gathering here on Nantucket:  “It’s hard to explain.  They’re not like most people we know”. On the night the legislation was signed the ever pretentious Bill O’Reilly insisted to a guest on his Fox program that it wasn’t the Tea Party who made Obama cave, but rather the American people- “The Folks” in O’Reilly speak – who did it. His guest- the 21st century American political sage Charles Krauthammer- contradicted him saying, “Bill, the Tea Party are the Folks.”  Who knew?    

('76 Contributor) Authors Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner have done the country great service with their book, Reckless Endangerment, recently noted at # 1 on the New York Times hardcover business reading list. If you anguish and puzzle as I do about our country’s future, here’s what you need to know about the mortgage meltdown and the unpunished scoundrels behind it. In 1992 unremarkable bureaucrats led by Alicia Munnell, authored a lending report under the aegis of the Boston Federal Reserve.  It was humdrum reading, except a predisposed reader could have concluded that lending discrimination was rampant in the home mortgage sector. And many did. The grievance industry oxygenated the convenient conclusion into a new affordable lending battle cry and Munnell’s document became the fuse that ignited the home mortgage meltdown.  Never mind that more objective thinkers would conclude that banks don’t lavish loans on applicants with erratic and low incomes, negligible cash reserves and poor credit histories. Voices of reason were quickly drowned out as the press and fairness denizens insisted that social justice be done.  Thus was born a new constitutional right: home ownership for all. And the opportunists were legion, just waiting in the wings. Enter Jim Johnson with Fannie Mae and her brother, Freddie Mac. Some of the misdeeds unearthed by the authors about the high flyers in these “public-private partnerships” and their chum-in-the-water enablers would have landed most of us in jail.  The lineup is entertaining not just for the sheer brazenness of their underhandedness, but also for the high profiles these same actors still have today.  Should you have opinions about Barney Frank, Angelo Mozillo, Allen Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, Robert Rubin, Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Peter Orszag and others, shelve them until you finish the book.  “A Team” players all in the credit meltdown, you’ll be shocked to learn the most crooked among them never served a day in jail. The Peter Principle of screw-up and move up seems to work exceptionally well in positions of public trust. Let’s not overlook Wall Street. For those of you who believe in fat cats, the evidence behind your gut instinct is here too.  What fair and not so fair-minded people mucked up and was steamrolled over government regulators and greased by well-moneyed lobbyists, was finally metastasized by the Gordon Geckos of New York City.  On this subject Morgenson and Rosner deliver great clarity. They detail how investment banking wonders piled trashy loans into gift boxes, called CDO’s (collateralized debt obligations), and laughed their way to million dollar bonuses while leaving taxpayers on the hook. Should you genuinely wonder how we have reached our current national economic malaise, you owe it to yourself to read this thoroughly researched and documented autopsy.  History may yet judge this calamity the American Waterloo.  

('76 Contributor) I just returned from a family reunion in Sioux Falls, SD, the same day Congress raised the debt ceiling.  Family reunions are interesting because a large, extended family represents a statistical sample from which one can infer much of what going on in the World.  It is obvious that young people are struggling, leaving their small towns and migrating to urban areas.  They are taking upwards of 6 years to get their undergraduate degrees and graduate debt-ridden.  The teaching jobs they were encouraged to pursue a decade ago are now few and far between.  Many of the most talented women in the family are pursuing jobs in law and medicine, but one wonders whether disruptive change will really afford them the careers they expect.  This younger generation is anxious.  They cannot begin families without an income and they are hitting the streets with debt and uncertainty. Another group were the males in the 50 year-old, plus group.  Many are unemployed and some have already spent years searching for jobs that have long ago were outsourced or eliminated. Most recently they lost their ability to use their home equity and 401Ks to stay above water and their wives have had to pick up the slack. Their kids have chosen state rather than private colleges.  Mobility and retraining seem all but impossible, so a form of siege mentality has set in. There is one group though, which so far, seems unscathed.  They are retired teachers or have jobs in the public sector.  Even they know that what has happened is not a business cycle, and profound structural changes are around the corner.  It’s as though there is a hurricane in the Gulf and we know it will eventually hit landfall. What is all but impossible to measure is the magnitude and speed of the changes. Recent discussions about the deficits have focused on the $14 trillion dollars in current federal debt.  What this week’s Bloomberg Business Week magazine points out is that there has been is no serious discussion of the looming $211 trillion fiscal gap between government spending and revenues.  Whatever number it adds up to be should give us reason to pause, because every $1 trillion dollars in cutbacks represents 10 million jobs.  It is now abundantly clear that whatever prosperity we enjoyed over the past thirty years was false, propped up by easy credit.  We are now experiencing de-leveraging and we do not know where rock bottom rests. I believe it is now time to acknowledge that we are in the 21st century.   Our lives are about to be transformed the way a caterpillar goes into a cocoon and emerges a butterfly. There will be a disintegration of the old structure. What emerges from the cocoon will barely resemble that old form. We cannot even begin to solve large problems by cutting costs; we must increase revenues. But, the suggestion that we increase revenues by raising taxes is a false choice. We must increase revenues by generating vast new wealth from exports into the global economy.   A new, 21st century economy cannot be manufacturing-based;  it must be based on services such as agriculture technology, water, health care, education, sewer, roads, construction and alternative energy.   These are all things third world countries desperately need and they are things we are very good at doing. The problem is that we just aren’t very efficient at these things because most of these services have been provided by the public sector. They have never been subjected to the disciplining effects of the market economy. For example, we simply cannot let health care become 20% of our GDP and continue to be an overhead item in our economy.  Medicare, Medicaid and health care are the dominant reason we cannot get our government’s fiscal house in order.  Nothing short of a leveling of the playing field will suffice.  If health care were an export industry we would encourage it to be as big as possible. You can go through one-by-one the other areas I outlined and see that significant reform must occur if these industries are to become efficient enough to export their goods and services in a global economy. In many cases we will have to let the old structures die off and replace them with new, incentivized, performance-based, competitive structures.  We didn’t reform the Savings & Loan Associations back in the 1980s—we killed them off and replaced them.  This probably will have to happen with the mortgage industry and retail banking. I for one believe that none of the change needed will happen unless we start with a transformation of our politics.  Recent events in Washington, DC have show how deeply troubled our system is. It is no longer about voting Republican or Democrat.  The bipolar two party system has, by necessity been triangulated by Independents and the Tea Party.  But, a coalition government is too slow to react and we cannot afford to become Italy.  I further assert that any transformation will require the elimination of the dominance of the attorney-turned-politician.  I recognize that singling out a profession is dangerous.  The chokehold this profession has on American politics is,  of late,  counter-productive.  The industrial age resulted in large, hierarchal organizations staffed by specialists.  The lawyer seemed the most general of the group and he was given the job to legislate and govern. In the end, though, the law itself is specialized and a process with more form than substance. Most lawyers do not even take a class in economics. We now need a new generation of generalists and we are going to have to grow them the same way the military breeds generals:  Through training and experience. In the end we are like Alice asking the Mad Hatter which way to go. If you don’t know where you would like to end up, then it doesn’t matter which path to take. We have to decide what kind of a world we want to leave to our children and to what extent we want the rest of the World to enjoy what we have.  

('76 Editor) Listening to Ken Buck, the Weld County DA and 2010 GOP Senate nominee, make the case at CCU yesterday for a constitutional stopper on deficit spending, I kept thinking of the Tytler Thesis.  Whether not the authorship of this famous warning is accurately cited, its ring of truth is convincing and - amidst our present circumstances - chilling.  What is the warning? About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tytler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, is supposed to have made these trenchant observations about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier: A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.  The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence: 1. from bondage to spiritual faith;2. from spiritual faith to great courage;3. from courage to liberty;4. from liberty to abundance;5. from abundance to complacency;6  from complacency to apathy;7. from apathy to dependence;8. From dependence back into bondage. Where do you think America is today, on that ladder from the top to the bottom and back?

(Centennial Fellow) Some Democrats and their left-wing supporters are telling grotesque lies about a Republican Medicare reform plan, sinking so low in one instance, so pathetically, immorally, disgustingly low, as to try to convince the nation through an ad that the reform will murder the elderly. It's not just the ad by an outfit called The Agenda Project that's threatening rescue from our spending and debt plight, although there is surely a special place in Hell for such nasty propaganda.  The ad shows someone looking vaguely like Rep. Paul Ryan, R.-Wisc., push an old woman to the edge of a cliff in a wheelchair, dumping the protesting, helpless soul to her certain death when they get there. Along the way, we are told how half the 46 million Medicare recipients make no more than $28,000 a year. It is made to seem they will have to fend for themselves if the Republican plan flies. Without the video vividness, any number of Democrats (along with Republican Newt Gingrich) have spread similarly dire depictions even though the plan drawn up by Ryan and passed by the House would not go into full effect for 10 years and would not apply to anyone currently on Medicare. The government would still provide funds for health insurance and would reward the well off less than those with lower incomes, which is something you would think the soak-the-rich left would applaud. Given the known proclivity of Democrats to demonize entitlement sanity and the fact that Americans do cling to these programs like lifesavers in a sea storm, it took extraordinary courage for Ryan and the GOP to address this issue honestly in the first place. The concept, by the way, is not a far-right invention -- Alice Rivlin, appointed to top positions by Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, endorses it.  That's not to say she likes the particulars or that the concept or the particulars should not be debated. Some Republicans besides Gingrich don't like the plan, and I agree with the case for increased vouchers for the least affluent and still more means testing. Consider economic writer Robert Samuelson's observations that the number of poor elderly has been shrinking, the number of high-income elderly rising and that married-couple households over 65 years of age have a median net worth of $385,000, a lot more than most of those funding their benefits. The thing is, this plan does eventually begin cutting Medicare spending in a serious way, as we absolutely must do for the sake of both Medicare and the nation. No one questions that revenues are going to fall trillions of dollars short of promises, and you can't fix it with federal taxes. As an online Cato Institute piece observes, the Congressional Budget Office says most of these taxes would have to be doubled over the next 40 years to foot the bill, reducing national income by a fifth. Want a job, anyone? The trouble with most congressional opponents is that they have no answer of their own, preferring reelection to serving their country, and Medicare's chief actuary has cast doubt on whether Obamacare's Medicare tinkering will do the trick, either.  Remember, too, that Medicare is just part of the issue -- three-fourths of us get some federal benefit or the other whether we need it or not, and as Samuelson and a host of other analysts testify, this largesse cannot be sustained. If the taxes don't get us, debt will, dramatically darkening our economic way and making this passing recession seem happiness and sunshine by comparison. Government has to cut it out, but instead what we get is a vicious TV lie, too many Democratic opportunists, some cowardly Republicans and a president whose chief ambition has so far been to pretty much enlarge everything despite some talk to the contrary. Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is now a syndicated columnist and a Centennial Institute Fellow.

Could it be the past is prologue in terms of a political price to pay for letting the national debt grow endlessly?  With high stakes electorally as fiscally in the upcoming battle over raising the debt ceiling, hop in my time machine and travel back a third of a century to 1978.  Bill Armstrong, president of Colorado Christian University today and a young congressman back then, warned in his underdog campaign against Sen. Floyd Haskell that the incumbent was reckless and wrong in having voted to let America's borrowing go north of $700 billion.  (Whoa, it's now 20 times that much!)  See Armstrong on the attack, and Haskell glumly wishing he was somewhere else, in a priceless debate video from the '78 race that Bill came from 30 points down to win.  It leads off an 8-minute tribute to Colorado's Mr. Conservative, presented to him by surprise at a Boulder County Republican dinner on May 21.  Watch it here.