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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Mark Steyn
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.
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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.
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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.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America:
Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn | S*********n
发帖数: 4050 | 2 and last time it wasn't was? |
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