America's Voracious Financial Appetite

Today, Pat Buchanan writes about Senator Bunning's fine hour last week. At least one Senator knows what is going on! (If only the other 99 would wake up.) This letter should be sent to your Senators, we need to bring their incomptency to their attention.

THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - March 9, 2010

Pitching for America
by Pat Buchanan

It was Father's Day, 1964, when the Phillies' Jim Bunning,
a father of seven, took the mound against the Mets.

Ninety pitches later, Bunning had struck out 10 and allowed
not one batter to reach first base. Twenty-seven up, 27
down. The first perfect game in 86 years in the National
League, and the finest hour of the Hall of Famer's baseball
career.

Beginning last week, Jim Bunning took the Senate floor for
five straight days to object to Harry Reid's call for
unanimous consent to waive through a $10 billion spending
bill. First, the Kentucky senator demanded, show me how
we're going to pay for it.

His own leadership abandoned Bunning. Susan Collins of
Maine assured the Senate and country that Republicans did
not back their colleague: "Senator Bunning's views do not
represent a majority of the caucus. It's important that
the American people understand that there is bipartisan
support for extending these vital programs."

Vital programs?

Had Bunning blocked rescue flights to Port au Prince or
Santiago, or ammunition for the Marines in Marja?

No. Bunning had held up for a couple of days a vote on a
$10 billion bill to extend unemployment benefits, make
payments to doctors under Medicare and extend satellite
TV to rural America. Reportedly, some 2,000 Transportation
Department workers were furloughed for a few days.

"If we cannot pay for a bill that all 100 senators
support," Bunning said, "how can we tell the American
people with a straight face that we will ever pay for
anything?"

Good question.


Indeed, the behavior of senators suggests that neither
party appreciates the depth of the crisis we are in or
the pain that will be required to get us out. Last week,
Bunning did more than any senator in many moons to raise
the consciousness of the country to the magnitude of the
deficit-debt crisis.

His taking to the barricades may have inconvenienced some,
but Bunning forced us all, briefly, to stare into the
chasm.

Consider. Congress this year will spend $1.6 trillion more
than it collects in revenue, with the largest outlays in
that FY 2010 budget for defense at $719 billion and Social
Security at $721 billion.

Thus, if the U.S. Government on Oct. 1, 2008, had shut down
the Pentagon and furloughed every soldier and civilian here
and around the world, and announced that it would not send
out a Social Security check for a full year to any of the
50 million retired and elderly, we would still be $160
billion short of balancing the budget. If you zeroed out
federal benefits to veterans for a full year, that, added
in, would bring us close.

Such is the magnitude of the fiscal crisis facing the
country.

To balance the budget this year would require a 43 percent
across-the-board cut in every category of federal spending
-- defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Homeland
Security, highways, etc. -- or, if one used taxes alone, a
72-percent increase in federal tax revenues.

Budget cuts of that magnitude are impossible. They would
cause a revolution. And any attempt at tax hikes of that
magnitude would drain off all available consumer capital
and hurl the economy into another Depression.

For the foreseeable future, then, this nation is going
deeper into debt.


And when Harry Reid and colleagues wave through yet another
$10 billion for unemployment checks and making sure farm
folks get yard dishes to see reruns of "The Sopranos,"
the United States must go to Beijing, Tokyo or Riyadh and
borrow the money.

That is the hole we are in.

And when one stares at some of those budget numbers, the
priorities of the Obama administration seem almost surreal.

In George W. Bush's last full year in office, we spent
$29 billion for "international affairs." The lion's share
of that was foreign aid. In FY 2011, the year for which
Congress has begun to budget, spending for international
affairs and foreign aid is to jump to $54 billion and
continue to surge through the Obama years.

What is the rationale for the United States, the world's
greatest debtor nation, putting itself deeper in debt to
China to send foreign aid to nations that will never repay
us and that vote habitually with China and against us in
the United Nations?

This city does not seem to grasp that the days of wine and
roses are over. We are not in the 1950s or 1960s anymore.
Then, we could throw open our markets to imports from the
world. Then, we could dish out foreign aid and fight wars
in Vietnam with 500,000 men, while maintaining 50,000
troops in Korea and 300,000 in Europe.

America is headed for a time when, like the British Empire,
she is going to have to make painful choices, or have them
forced upon us.

He may have been booed all last week, but Jim Bunning
pitched one of the best games of his career.


END OF Conservative Review

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