That comment caught my attention Sunday morning, as I listened to Dan Gottlieb’s guest on his early morning program, Voices in the Family, aired on Philadelphia’s NPR radio station, WHYY FM.
The show’s topic centered on the issue of personal health, and of how a person can maintain it throughout life only by making periodic “deposits,” such as maintaining good eating habits, regularly exercising, and remaining socially active and engaged.
But it quickly came to mind that this compelling adage borrowed from Gottlieb’s radio guest is just as easily applicable to the current fiscal, monetary and budgetary mess bubbling hot within our nation’s capital.
Pundits, media talking heads, politicians, and lobbyists like to embed labels in their talking points.
The label currently in vogue and the spinning of it within the Washington Beltway is designed to scare the rest of us into thinking that between now and the end of December the nation is about to fall off “The Fiscal Cliff.”
This is about as credible as the claim that, according to the Mayan calendar, the world will end on December 21, 2012. Surely the world will end some day, but not this month. And just as surely, we are going broke as a nation, but not exactly this month.
The problem is not that the country is about to suddenly and precipitously fall off the 90° edge of a steep “Fiscal Cliff” mere days before the President is scheduled to go away for a 21-day vacation to Hawaii later this month.
It is that the borrowing habits of the White House and the U.S. Congress over the last three decades or so have been steadily climbing up a slope of debt in order to feed the budgetary monster of runaway spending. In the last four years the slope of borrowing has become disturbingly much steeper.
Now, the brains in Washington are looking for someone – anyone, actually – to make larger deposits into the national treasury.
Sadly, there no longer are enough depositors left to cover all the checks being written.
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