Budget gimmicks and revolutionary lies.

Finally, the government has used budget tricks and gimmicks to put off real fiscal reform and hide the actual costs of out-of-control spending. The outcome is that we end up with more spending, more deficits and more debt.

Budget gimmicks, however, have consequences beyond letting lawmakers get away with spending money. With a limited budget, policymakers - like nearly everyone else in the world - must prioritize spending. They must choose the best policies to adopt based on available funds and forgo other projects. [However, w]hen legislators manipulate numbers in order to fund programs that otherwise might not pass muster, they are not obligated to show that the programs serve genuine social or financial policy objectives.^[1]

In short, the highly intelligent, motivated, educated, experienced, principled people we send to Congress engage in day-in-and-day-out intellectual dishonesty on spending . . . and have done so for decades. With the disastrous consequences that are plain now. Our Greek moment is just down the road according to the deficit commission.

It’s like the failure to defend the border, the evisceration of our manufacturing capacity, the favoring of illegal foreign workers over citizen workers, the pandering to Muslims, and the deliberate crippling of our energy economy. One simply cannot grasp that political leaders who say they are patriots in fact support and defend federal action that manifestly undermines our security, economic well being, and constitutional structure.

In the 1930s, the U.S. Supreme Court completely did a Dukes of Hazard triple U-turn on 140+ years of prior Supreme Court interpretation of the Commerce Clause that has made possible this extra-constitutional “legal” regime that did much to create a federal government that knows no limits to its power.

It can with impunity nationalize a major U.S. corporation, take over 1/6 of the economy under the banner of socialized medicine, and even sponsor ads on weight loss or sex discussion with your kids. Good luck finding authorization for any of that in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

The blatantly spurious “emanations and penumbras” grounds of Roe v. Wade similarly snatched power from the states regarding an issue that was exactly the kind of contentious issue that should have been fought out in individual states according to the original constitutional scheme. But these revolutionary judicial acts -- in their essence lies -- are ignored by the grifters, time servers, and opportunists who benefit from their effect. Name me the state chief justice or bar association leader who has raised his or her voice to keep these betrayals before the people in the last 50 years.

And the people are complicit too. Which makes the moral failure of the judicial officials who are, certainly at the federal level, immune from the pressure of electoral politics all that much more reprehensible. (Justice Thomas is one magnificent exception.)

As with our legal protections, so with our fiscal health. American political leaders undermine them with lies and gimmicks.

And the GOP in Bush's time was no exception.

Since the end of the Cold War, the GOP and the Democratic Party have increasingly morphed into a statist corporatist oligarchy that champions open borders and free trade. The result has been the gradual dissolution of America. Our borders are a bleeding sore; uncontrolled immigration is rampant; our industrial base is dwindling; factories and jobs are outsourced overseas; the middle- and working-classes are shrinking; government spending is out of control; the national debt is exploding; and special interests dominate Washington. Traditional America is dying.^[2]

Ours is a culture of corruption and decay. And we may just be one congressional election away from an irreversible political shift founded on vote fraud and amnesty for a vast pool of undocumented Democrat voters who’ll support socialism and the Democrat party now in the firm grip of leftist extremists.

Notes
^[1] "To deal with debt, we have to stop lying about it." By Veronique de Rugy, Washington Times, 7/16/10.
^[2] "The conservative ban on Michael Savage." By Jeffrey T. Kuhner, Washington Times, 7/15/10.