Optimism is in Short Supply Now

Watching our “leaders,” if they deserve to be called that, in Washington these days is an exercise for only the brave nowadays.

For seven months, they’ve known that the federal government’s borrowing authority would reach its statutory maximum Aug. 2, yet all of them have dilly-dallied, playing their games of political brinksmanship and dragging the United States of America to the economic precipice.

They should all hang their heads in shame over how they’ve conducted this nation’s business. All of them, Democrats and Republicans.

And hypocrisy? Oh, there’s hypocrisy enough to sully each and every one of them.

Republicans, for example, said virtually nothing during the eight years under President George W. Bush, when the federal debt more than doubled from just under $5 trillion to more than $10 trillion.

The GOP, which controlled both houses of Congress for most of the Bush presidency, in fact raised the debt ceiling half a dozen times, with nary a peep from anyone about the rate of spending. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were paid for with borrowed money, which the GOP supported. At the same time, the administration, with the GOP’s complicity, created a massive new — and unfunded — entitlement program, Medicare Part D Prescription Plan. And most unbelievable of all, Bush and his Republican allies pushed through a series of massive tax cuts, draining the federal treasury of needed revenue at the same time they were spending money hand over fist.

But lest you think that only Republicans are drunken-sailor spenders, think again.

President Obama and his Democratic cohorts have added another $4 trillion to the the debt in only a matter of a couple of years while at the same time instituting policies that have greatly hampered the U.S. economy’s ability to pull itself out of the Great Recession.

Coming into office, the president’s chief concern was the Holy Grail of the American left for the past five decades: health care reform on a massive scale.

No matter that what the country needed was a war-like focus on job creation; rather Democrats spent the first 18 months of the Obama presidency pushing through health care reform. And arguably, the uncertainty of health care reform — the constitutionality of which is still tied up in the federal courts — has been the greatest possible drag on job creation.

To top it off, the Democratic-controlled Congress failed to produce a single federal budget during either the 2009 or 2010 fiscal years, preferring instead to keep the government operating on one continuing resolution after another.

So here we are today, on the precipice of an economic catastrophe, of seeing the Aaa bond rating of the United States of America downgraded and possibly of another recession. Democrats are pulling out their old line of “We’re just protecting the widows and orphans” while Republicans profess “No higher taxes, period, even if it’s over the dead body of the U.S. economy.”

And the vast majority of us just want government to work, to be lean and efficient, to do its job. Is that really so much to ask for these days?