The man in the Oval Office is like Wimpy, Popeye’s foil, who’d “gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
Joe Biden demands trillions of dollars of spending over the next eight years and promises America will pay for it over 15 years. It’s implausible because, like Wimpy, whose trick was to avoid showing up on Tuesday, Biden won’t be in the White House when the bills come due, and neither will our current congressional spendthrifts be on Capitol Hill.
You can trust future Washington politicians not to spend new money when inherited bills are still unpaid — said no one ever!
A group of congressional Republicans wants to create a bipartisan commission to balance the federal budget in 10 years. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, of Wyoming, lead sponsor of the Sustainable Budget Act, aptly commented, “We’re on an unsustainable trajectory. We’ve become numb to the word ‘trillion.'”
She’s right, but sadly, the Republican Party squandered its credibility on fiscal matters long ago. The GOP began to fall silent about mortgaging our children’s future a decade before Donald Trump explicitly repudiated necessary reform of Social Security, Medicare, and other “entitlements.”
The word “entitlement” is misleading, despite recipients arguing they’re owed the money because they paid in during their work lives. The Supreme Court has ruled that Social Security and Medicare taxes aren’t contractually binding on the federal government. But a more compelling point is that baby boomers have no moral right to have it both ways. For decades, they knowingly elected politicians who lied to them about spending, so it’s their own fault if rising generations change the rules to prevent greedy chuckleheads from eating their cake and having it too. (I say that as a boomer who stands to lose if the status quo is changed.)
A new push to end orgiastic federal spending will be welcome if it starts returning the United States to the common sense policy of borrowing only for extraordinary spending rather than for basic current expenses. We won’t get that from the Democrats. But are there any in the GOP who’ll step up?
Several Republicans are beginning to peep over the electoral parapet toward 2024. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems like an early front-runner, but former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also been in the Iowa cornfields, and Sen. Tom Cotton has made repeat visits to New Hampshire. Another likely contender is former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, whom we feature in Nicole Russell’s cover story. Haley’s path is precarious. She is credentialed and popular but also carries Trumpian and anti-Trumpian baggage, and she may be too emollient for today’s venomous politics. Pollster and Washington Examiner columnist Kristen Soltis Anderson writes about what Republican voters are really looking for.
In our Life & Arts section, Blake Smith rips apart the “decolonization” bunk gushing from the academy, Graham Hillard enjoys the entertaining absurdity of Netflix’s new sci-fi series, The One, and Eric Felten searches high and low for a Frank Lloyd Wright hat.
