This is a freakingly great concept! If you can’t spend for everything, try PRIORITIZING the spending.
Authorized and even appropriated spending isn’t “the public debt.” For constitutional purposes, promised benefits from Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements aren’t even property, as the Supreme Court held in Flemming v. Nestor (1960), and Congress has as much authority to reduce them as to increase them. When lawmakers were drafting the 14th Amendment, they revised Section 4’s language to replace the term “obligations” with “debts.” If the Treasury ran out of money, the constitutional obligation to pay bondholders would trump all statutory obligations to spend.
“NO, No, no!” is what we hear from Democrats (pretty much all of them) and not a small number of fallow Republicans (The Stupid Party) who are He**bent on continuing to self-bash the Republican reputation (see how I did that, Ronnie Abbot??). Every Government dollar is sacred but only gets thrice blessed once it is spent on their priorities.
Which to say on all of their agenda items. NO program can be cut; no dollar can go unspent, and none of their activist’s supporters cannot go unenriched.
Government can NEVER be diminished, and that’s the reason their only argument is, “You’ll ruin the Faith and Credit of the US in the world if you don’t increase the Debt Ceiling!”. Never, EVER will you hear them say, “OK, everything and everybody in Govt gets a 5% haircut (financially). All they want to do is keep increasing the spending because Big Government must always be in the process of becoming BIGGER Government – so much the better in becoming their end game – where we are all dependent on the State and they will have achieved “equity” -> no one can be better than anyone else in ANYTHING (Harrison Bergeron, anyone?).
And as last century’s history taught us, that ends up in Shared Misery unless you are at the top of the heap of those who HAVE to control that “equity” (which is definitely NOT Equality).
Reasonable people, NORMAL people, FAMILY people sitting around the kitchen table when the pink slip arrives (or pink email or tweet – that’s PROGRESS?) and the money in stops, decide to prioritize. They decide what’s important: mortgage, electricity, heat for the house, car payment, food, clothes, and meds for the kids. Other stuff falls down from that. Some things fall out of the checkbook/debit/credit card spending flow after that – theaters, dining out, and other non-essentials.
At NO time, however, will those in Government do that. Biden just put in a $7 Trillion annual budget and announced that everything is needed, including, and very importantly, not telling people that it doubles the size of the Federal Government spending. There is no prioritization process.
You see, it is ALWAYS their money to be spent, and nary a thought that it was ours first (or now third as well as we will have to pay back the borrowed money + the interest on that borrowed money).
So who is at fault, the root cause?
We are – or, at least, some of us. Rather “them” as if I was in charge, I’d be looking at every program that has even the tiniest whiff of Stupidity wafting up from it, or one that can’t be traced back to the Federal Government’s Constitutional Powers, or one that should be offloaded back to the States, or that it belongs to the private sector.
And let the chips fall where they may. Besides, during my time in local government, I ALWAYS said that it was never our money.
After all, that’s the reasonable and Normal thing to do.
(H/T: Instapundit)
