Writing at NRO, Jonah Goldberg comments on the sky-is-falling hysteria surrounding the impending “sequester” — which, were you just to listen to the news or to White House Press releases, you’d never imagine would still leave the federal government spending more money than last year.
Mr. Goldberg observes:
Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks he can convince the country to accept them if the choice is between what he calls reasonable revenue increases and catastrophic cuts that will let people die in the streets, leave children to go hungry and illiterate, and allow poisoned food to sit rancid on supermarket shelves.
And he’s not crazy for it. This strategy has worked time and time again. If an agency has a billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed to keep a bridge from collapsing on a grade school’s Thanksgiving parade.
It’s hard to capture in words the immorality of what we’ve done to generations yet unborn. Our childrens’ children will spit on our graves when they look at our criminal stewardship of the great nation they ought to have inherited, and find themselves stuck instead with the bill we’ve run up in their names to pay for our hedonism, our greed, and our selfish, childish belief that the world owes us a living. We’re no better than junkies who will do anything, no matter how fraudulent or felonious, just to keep the next fix coming.
I can’t, in general, blame our politicians for this, on either side of the aisle; they’re just doing what politicians do, and they couldn’t keep doing it in the way they are if we didn’t want them to. This lardaceous, otiose gundyguts, this indolent, Falstaffian swillbelly of a nation is simply what America has let itself become.
You can read the rest of Mr. Goldberg’s essay here.