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Had I been asked
to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your
dinner plans:
“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total
collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific
crowd!”
I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one
would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the
possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President
Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to
change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state — its unprecedented
world-record brokeness — was not even mentioned. If, as I was, you happened
to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the
misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the
gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no
indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances
is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The
message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should
be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty
flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs
and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more
of the unaffordable same.
The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted
that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10
billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some
savings — and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the
government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on
Thursday Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from
2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created
more than three million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers
arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000
jobs in that period just to stand still.
Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never
happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever
fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the
Nineties. At the time, the excuse for Clinton’s mountain of legislative
molehills was that all the great battles had been won, and, in the absence of
a menacing Russian bear, what else did a president have to focus on except
criminalizing toilet tanks over 1.6 gallons. President Obama does not enjoy
the same dispensation, and any historians stumbling upon a surviving DVD
while sifting through the ruins of our civilization will marvel at how his
accumulation of delusional trivialities was apparently taken seriously by the
assembled political class.
An honest leader would feel he owed it to the citizenry to impress upon
them one central truth — that we can’t have any new programs because we’ve
spent all the money. It’s gone. The cupboard is bare. What’s Obama’s plan to
restock it? “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his
secretary,” the president told us. “Asking a billionaire to pay at least as
much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”
But why stop there? Americans need affordable health care and affordable
master’s degrees in Climate Change and Social Justice Studies, so why not
take everything that Warren Buffett’s got? After all, if you confiscated the
total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it would come to $1.5
trillion.
Which is just a wee bit less than the federal shortfall in just one year
of Obama-sized budgets. 2011 deficit: $1.56 trillion. But maybe for 2012 a
whole new Forbes 400 of Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs will emigrate to
the Hamptons and Malibu and keep the whole class-warfare thing going for a
couple more years.
The so-called “Buffett Rule” is indicative not so much of “common sense”
as of the ever widening gap between the Brobdingnagian problem and the
Lilliputian solutions proposed by our leaders. Obama can sacrifice the virgin
daughters of every American millionaire on the altar of government spending
and the debt gods will barely notice so much as to give a perfunctory belch
of acknowledgement. The president’s first term has added $5 trillion to the
debt — a degree of catastrophe unique to us. In an Obama budget, the entire
cost of the Greek government would barely rate a line-item. Debt-to-GDP and
other comparative measures are less relevant than the hard-dollar numbers:
It’s not just that American government has outspent America’s ability to fund
it, but that it’s outspending the planet’s.
Who gets this? Not enough of us — which is exactly how Obama likes it.
His only “big idea” — that it should be illegal (by national fiat) to drop
out of school before your 18th birthday — betrays his core belief: that more
is better, as long as it’s government-mandated, government-regulated,
government-staffed — and funded by you, or Warren Buffett, or the Chinese
Politburo, or whoever’s left out there.
What of his likely rivals this November? Those of us who have lived in
once-great decaying polities recognize the types. Jim Callaghan, prime
minister at 10 Downing Street in the Seventies, told a friend of mine that he
saw his job as managing Britain’s decline as gracefully as possible. The
United Kingdom certainly declined on his watch, though not terribly
gracefully. In last Monday’s debate, Newt Gingrich revived the line and
accused by implication Mitt Romney of having no higher ambition than to
“manage the decline.” Running on platitudinous generalities, Mitt certainly
betrays little sense that he grasps the scale of the crisis. After a fiery
assault by Rick Santorum on Romney’s support for an individual mandate in
health care, Mitt sneered back at Rick that “it wasn’t worth getting angry
over.” Which may be a foretaste of the energy he would bring to any attempted
course correction in Washington.
Newt, meanwhile, has committed himself to a lunar colony by the end of
his second term, and, while pandering to an audience on Florida’s “Space
Coast,” added that, as soon as there were 13,000 American settlers on the
moon, they could apply for statehood. Ah, the old frontier spirit: I hear
Laura Ingalls Wilder is already working on Little House in the Crater.
Maybe Newt’s on to something. Except for the statehood part. One day,
when America gets the old foreclosure notice in the mail, wouldn’t it be nice
to close up the entire joint, put the keys in an envelope, slide it under the
door of the First National Bank of Shanghai, and jet off on Newt’s Starship
Government-Sponsored Enterprise?
There are times for dreaming big dreams, and there are times to wake up.
This country will not be going to the moon, any more than the British or
French do. Because, in decline, the horizons shrivel. The only thing that’s
going to be on the moon is the debt ceiling. Before we can make any more
giant leaps for mankind, we have to make one small, dull, prosaic, earthbound
step here at home — and stop. Stop the massive expansion of micro-regulatory
government, and then reverse it. Obama has vowed to press on. If Romney and
Gingrich can’t get serious about it, he’ll get his way.
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