A Future of Growth or Government?

The Left snickers now that while the public favors spending restraint in the abstract it abhors (and will abhor Republican) reductions in the specific. President Obama is staking his re-election on this – that voters will recoil from the GOP and turn back towards him when Congress tries to do something it has not done in generations: pass a budget smaller than the previous one.

That may be. Existential spending cuts may very well cost Republicans (and the republic) another long term of Obama, possibly their House majority.

But that does not change the substantive reality that the ruinous course for us and especially the next generation of Americans is to do what President Obama and the Left propose: nothing. For decades we have indulged ourselves not with our own money but with that of our children and grandchildren. Now we face the upshot of that irresponsibility, that generational theft.

It presents us with a choice. One is to select a future of growth and prosperity, a choice that entails the shared sacrifice of spending cuts and entitlement reform that will permit tax levels to remain low, alter the incentives in the health-care industry to improve its pricing and provision, and free future Americans from what Jefferson once called "the dead hand of the past."

The other is to do nothing, to sullenly limp towards a future suffocated by a ubiquity of red. Debt levels approaching GDP will necessitate even more exponential growth in government as Uncle Sam has no other recourse but to completely grab onto the billfolds and checkbooks of Americans. The need for such an overweening state will choke out even the faintest hope of economic growth and bring us closer, if not in lockstep, with the stifled economies of Europe. Having stuck our children with the tab, we will have also ungraciously denied them the means to pick it up.

Hoping only for political gains in the next election, this is the option President Obama and his party of unions and special interest payouts have selected. For those who seek another course, "have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."