Loan Arranger

Back towards the end of April of this year, President Obama appointed a bi-partisan commission, headed by Alan Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, to study the impact of the growing national debt on America’s future. The commission is slated to provide a full report to Congress and the President later this year, but in a presentation to the nation’s governors in Boston on July 11^th, the top leadership of that commission suggested strongly what the report might look like. In a world where dozens of states may collapse without federal funds and our educational system (from top to bottom) is increasingly contracting and failing to produce productive graduates, the commission co-chairmen called the “current budgetary trends a cancer ‘that will destroy the country from within’ unless checked by tough action in Washington.” Washington Post (July 12^th).

The commission co-chairs clearly differentiated the blind-slide crash of 2008 from the knowing leveraging of the national deficit to solve the problem: “The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. ‘The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans -- the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries,’ Simpson said.

“‘We can't grow our way out of this,’ Bowles said. ‘We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. . . . The reality is we've got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.’” So the future of this country, according to this pair, is bleak and untenable without significant cost reductions and significant new taxes (“increase revenues” without new taxes?). With mid-term elections around the corner, guess how much traction these messages will hold? From Republicans who believe tax cuts solve all problems to Democrats who are committed to government spending as the only viable way out of the current long-term financial crisis, the commission leadership has a platform for… er… nobody.

The gathered governors felt a growing sense of abandonment from Washington, and that the feds were going to stick the states, many of them clearly insolvent, with carrying the financial burden of even more programs: “Bowles, who noted that the 1997 balanced-budget agreement between the Clinton White House and the Republican-controlled Congress included many provisions that put more burdens on the states, said that wasn’t likely… ‘I don't think you're going to see a lot of devolution coming from us because the states are all broke,’ he said… Simpson also warned that the November elections could add another wild card to the work of the commission. ‘I have no idea what's going to happen on Election Day but it's going to be disruptive . . .,’ he said. ‘It's going to be a big wake-up call around the whole United States. I have no idea where it's going, but thank heaven we have a month then to work through the wreckage.’” The Post.

I look at the clear domestic needs of this country and the lagging ability to create meaningful jobs to sustain our future, and then I look at how we have waged a false war – over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – and continue to wage an unwinnable war in Afghanistan and wonder where those trillions of dollars could have gone where they might actually impact our country for the better... rather than serve as an anti-American Islamist recruitment poster to generate even more armed warriors dedicated to our destruction. Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele (pictured above), was skewered by Democrats and Republicans alike when he suggested earlier this month that the Afghan war was unwinnable saying, “Everyone who has tried, over 1,000 years of history, has failed and there are reasons for that. There are other ways you could engage in Afghanistan.” I’m sorry, but Mr. Steele is right; the Taliban have never been stronger since their government collapsed and the United States has never been more hated in Central Asia – particularly among our purported Pakistani allies – than we are today. Even the mega-corrupt Hamid Karzai administration is looking for political alternatives to the U.S.-led NATO effort in his country; the writing is so clearly on the wall. It’s time to get out and stop inflicting more long-term damage on ourselves and strengthening our radical Islamist recruiters. Now.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while this may not be a popular position, I would really like to see learn history’s lessons the easy way for once.