Fortress America—The Only Alternative To Fiscal Ruin

That didn’t take long. Twelve days after Biden signed the ballyhooed legislation unfreezing the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, the public debt crossed the $32 trillion mark on June 16th. And that was only nine months after it crossed the $31 trillion level in October 2022.

For that matter, by this date in 2033 the public debt is guaranteed to be above $55 trillion. The $1.5 trillion of alleged “cuts” in the McCarthy-Biden debt bill were phony as a $2 bill and won’t make a damn bit of difference to the $25 trillion of new public debt that is baked into the budgetary cake over the next decade.

Then again, who is counting, anyway?

Certainly, not anyone in Washington. The Dems never really cared very much about the debt and the GOP long ago forfeited its bone fides as an agent of fiscal rectitude. That happened when a perverted form of supply-sideism became an excuse for big tax cuts financed with large gulps of public debt.

But since the turn of the century the GOP has really gone AWOL on its core job in American democracy, which is to function as the sentinel of fiscal responsibility. After all, the Dems long ago acquired the axe on the Welfare State—so what’s the point of the GOP being in the “me too” business?

Now, however, it’s far worse than the post-war “me too” party of Nelson Rockefeller and Chuck Percy. The present day GOP was hijacked a few decades ago by a loathsome tribe of born-again Trotskyite statists, who discovered that a perpetual state of global war was the true passageway to political power and aggrandizement of the state. We are speaking of the neocons, of course, and the GOP’s ranks of residual cold warriors who never figured out that when the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history in 1991 that the military requirements for national security shrank drastically.