We’re all frightened about the huge debt the U.S. is running up.
We’re buying things taxpayers don’t want (99 weeks of unemployment benefits, for starters), and we’ll be writing a big check every April 15 as far as the eye can see.
But it’s even worse than our having to pay for things we don’t want.
Kevin McCarthy, the up-and-coming California congressman, explains the looming debt crisis in a new and even more frightening way:
Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull. The edge of a black hole, the event horizon, is a boundary that marks the point of no return. Once an object crosses the event horizon, it cannot escape and will be ripped to pieces, atom by atom.
While the astrophysical properties differ, America is facing its own crisis for which the gravitational pull is growing stronger every day: a national-debt crisis. Once our country is fully engulfed in a debt crisis, our economy will be torn apart and every American will be a victim of the federal government’s failure to prevent this disaster.
Failure to prevent this crisis? The federal government is rushing towards it. But the black hole image is apt, and McCarthy makes a number of excellent points:
Washington does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. In 2009, the federal government collected $2.1 trillion in revenue, but spent $3.52 trillion – an 18 percent increase in spending from 2008. Republicans have offered numerous spending cuts, but the Democratic majority is out of control. Contained in their spending package, which was purportedly designed to stimulate economic growth, were such necessities as $71,623 to study the effects of cocaine addiction on monkeys and $390,000 to study the effects of malt liquor and marijuana on adults. While some have likened Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Congress to a swamp, it seems more akin to Animal House.