Alas, but no. Not only are we deep in the dark heart of the forest, but we’re still walking in the wrong direction. The pace may have slowed, but the trajectory has not. The immediate cash-flow crisis has passed, but the long-term solvency crisis remains. We are still borrowing enormous amounts of money, still selling our children into debt slavery through our own spending insanity...
But the debt is still astronomical and still swiftly growing.
So make no mistake: the Budget Control Act doesn’t put a dent in the mountain of debt our government has accrued. If the commitments of the BCA are fulfilled, then we will add to that mountain at a slightly-less-manic pace than before, but the very purpose of the act was to enable the big Beltway spenders to make the mountain bigger. Worse, the BCA leaves completely unchanged the social and political dynamics that have led to this debt in the first place. Our political elite are addicted to spending. It’s how they curry favor, it’s how they win elections, and it’s how they exercise and enjoy their power. They’re perfectly willing to borrow money to feed the addiction, because they have a credit card. The name on the credit card is: You and Your Children.
One of the great difficulties of this issue, for Christians, is that the morality of spending and debt has been so thoroughly demagogued that it’s impossible to advocate cuts in government spending without being accused of hatred for the poor and needy. A group calling itself the “Circle of Protection” recently promoted a statement on “Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor.” But we don’t need to protect the programs. We need to protect the poor. Indeed, sometimes we need to protect the poor from the programs. Too many anti-poverty programs are beneficial for the politicians that pass them, and veritable boondoggles for the government bureaucracy that administers them, but they actually serve to rob the poor of their dignity and their initiative, they undermine the family structures that help the poor build prosperous lives, and ultimately mire the poor in poverty for generations. Does anyone actually believe that the welfare state has served the poor well?...
Timothy Dalrymple then goes on in this Philosophical Fragments article ("Whom Would Jesus Indebt?") to explain why he's involved with a new group called Christians for a Sustainable Economy. And he invites you to find out more about the group and even sign their petition to America's politicians. I did both. And I encourage you to do the same. Great stuff there.
