Guy Benson

This piece came out in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, but its content is too important to let it glide past without sufficient amplification.  Its authors are Chris Cox (a former Congressman and SEC Chairman) and Bill Archer (the former Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee).  Both were members of President Clinton's bipartisan commission on tax and entitlement reform in 1994.  As today's politicians bicker over the minutiae of a deal to avert the man-made disaster known as the "fiscal cliff," Cox and Archer warn that America is headed toward a far more dangerous precipice if our entitlement spending isn't responsibly and seriously reined in.   Their piece explicates why the record-setting, eye-popping annual deficit and national debt figures that most Americans have heard about -- $1.1 Trillion and $16 trillion, respectively -- don't even approach capturing the magnitude of Uncle Sam's red ink.  In short, the government is relying on budgeting gimmicks and practices that would land private sector accountants in jail:


So what does a more complete picture of the government's unfunded liabilities (money spent or promised to be spent, that isn't paid for) look like?  It ain't pretty:


These are staggering, deeply concerning numbers.  Our real national debt is approaching $87 trillion and counting, yet our leaders are squabbling tax hikes on "the rich" that would reap (at best) approximately $82 billion per year.  Cox and Archer place the ignorance and folly of the "we have a revenue problem" crowd in stark relief:


These figures underscore the profound and alarming lack of seriousness that has gripped our politics.  The president prattles on about the "Buffett Rule" and "fair shares," but those associated revenues amount to mere snowflakes in the face of the biggest debt avalanche in history sliding down our national mountain.  Sure, taxing the rich might make some people feel good (click here for an unvarnished articulation of liberals' class envy agenda), but it does absolutely nothing to fix the real problem.  The Republicans have at least put a serious plan, with bipartisan origins, on the table to begin to address these issues.  Democrats have screamed "no!" yet they continue to put forth no realistic, specific ideas of their own.  Frustratingly, this cynical strategy has worked out pretty well for them at the ballot box in recent years, but at some point the jig will be up.  I'm sure it will all be the Republicans' fault then, too, but unlike politicians and the media, the arithmetic doesn't lie.

Guy Benson


Author Photo credit: Jensen Sutta Photography