More than a few people have said that I’m the boy who cries wolf. The reason is my decades-long concern with the ever-growing U.S. government debt. For years — in Congress and as a governor — I have sounded the alarm about our federal government’s corrosive habit of spending more than it takes in and its need to borrow ever more money to plug that gap. Today, the federal government budget deficit is $1.8 trillion, and the outstanding government bonds and other forms of borrowing — the national debt — totals $36 trillion. And yet the republic still stands, I...