Free Republic

When your dissolute political establishment sinks to the point of being fit for lectures from Chinese Communists on spending restraint, and from erstwhile Soviet revanchists on foreign-affairs modesty, you are at rock bottom. Welcome to Washington. Remember two summers ago, the depths of the last Beltway debacle on out-of-control borrowing that charted the course for today’s latest Beltway debacle on spending and taxes. It was then that China’s rulers blasted Uncle Santa for our “debt addiction,” our failure to observe “the commonsense principle” that a nation, like a family, must “live within its means.” At the time, U.S. sovereign debt...

In President Obama’s address to the Associated Press Luncheon on Wednesday, he claimed that he is preventing disaster. Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s proposed budget cuts would still allow publicly held debt to increase by $5.5 trillion over the next ten years, but to Obama, they mean Americans will be dying from starvation and defenseless from hurricanes and other natural disasters. “Demagoguery” is not too strong of a word to describe Obama’s speech. Two million mothers and young children will be left without “access to healthy food.” Violent crime will soar and illegal aliens will flood across our borders because of...

As we enter the New Year, the financial landscape is littered with essentially bankrupt governments. Governments at every level are in dire financial straits. During the last decade’s governmental spending binge, total state and municipal bond debt has nearly doubled to almost $3 trillion, while federal debt rose over 150 percent from under $6 trillion to almost $14 trillion. Several dozen cities, including Harrisburg, Los Angeles, and Detroit, teeter on the brink of insolvency. Municipal bonds, once considered ultra-safe, are approaching junk status. State governments from coast to coast are broke. From Republican Governor Chris Christie’s New Jersey on the...

Though he would be loathe to admit it, David Brooks agrees with Glenn Beck. Consider the opening of his op-ed today, Brooks writes: That which can’t continue doesn’t. A nation can spend and spend, pile debt upon debt, but eventually there comes a reality moment when some leader emerges to say enough is enough and when decent people, looking around at themselves and their own best nature, respond by demanding a return to responsibility. Now consider the portion of the Glenn Beck show yesterday the left is having a bit of fun laughing at: