Government's insatiable hunger for your money...

...as illustrated by this animation from the opening credits of The Jetsons:

(Via *Clean* Funny Pics)

Quick Quote: Thomas Jefferson on the immorality of passing the public debt from one generation to the next

"I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence."

— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison (September 6, 1789)

Via The Federalist Papers (on Facebook)

Sen. Barack Obama condemns the Obama administration’s “leadership failure” in debt limit crisis

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies... 
 
Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that "the buck stops here." Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
 
-- Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), March 20, 2006

Quick Quote: James Madison on the evil of public debt

I regret, as much as any member, the unavoidable weight and duration of the burdens to be imposed; having never been a proselyte to the doctrine, that public debts are public benefits. I consider them, on the contrary, as evils which ought to be removed as fast as honor and justice will permit, and shall heartily join in the means necessary for that purpose.

– James Madison, Debates in the House of Representatives on the First Report on Public Credit, February 11, 1790; “Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle," edited and with a Preface by Lance Banning (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), Part II: The Leadership Divides

(via The Federalist Papers (Facebook))

There’s simply no way to spin the budget deal as a victory for fiscal sanity

Politics is the art of the possible. -- Otto von Bismarck

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. -- John Kenneth Galbraith

If $38 billion out of a $1.5 trillion budget shortfall is all that was possible, we’re done for.

Another grim milestone for federal spending

Total federal spending has consistently outpaced tax receipts for so long that to even raise the point tends to elicit yawns. 

However, as the Weekly Standard reports today, this year brings us to a milestone without precedent:

We have now gotten to the point — as I noted yesterday — where if national defense, interstate highways, national parks, homeland security, and all other discretionary programs somehow became absolutely free, we’d still have a budget deficit. The White House Office of Management and Budget projects that in the current fiscal year (2011), mandatory spending alone will exceed all federal receipts. So even if we didn’t spend a single cent on discretionary programs, we still wouldn’t be able to balance our budget this year — let alone pay off any of the $14 trillion in debt that we have already accumulated.

Just an Olympiad ago, in 2007, the picture was quite different. In fact, in that year, federal revenues not only exceeded mandatory spending, but they exceeded it by more than $1 trillion ($1.117 trillion, to be more exact). The next year, 2008, during which the gap fell to a still-huge $914 billion, the Bush administration released a report issuing a rather dire warning (p. 25).  The report said that, “if left unchanged, mandatory spending alone is projected to exceed total projected Government receipts in approximately 50 years.”  That dire prediction has now come true — about 50 years earlier than projected.

This bears repeating: Even if we brought discretionary spending to $0.00 this year, there still would not be enough tax receipts to fund the mandatory (in other words, entitlement, or wealth-transfer) spending programs.

This problem goes much, much deeper than the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.  As Kevin D. Williamson observed in NRO on March 14, there aren’t enough millionaires out there to balance the budget.  Even if  all of the income of “the rich” was simply confiscated, the debt would continue to grow.

The Bush administration might be forgiven for being so far off on its projection… truly, this country has never before seen anything like the profligacy of this administration and its allies in Congress.

Quick Quote: James Madison on the federal leviathan

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

— James Madison, The Federalist #62

Memo to GOP: The national debt wouldn't be where it is now without your active participation

I sure do hope the GOP bigwigs understand the sentiment that appears to be set to thrust their party back into power.  If they think this is just a matter of letting a different party preside over the sinking of our country, their base will withdraw its support with extreme prejudice.
CNSNews, October 14:

The national debt increased for the 53rd straight fiscal year, jumping $1.65 trillion in fiscal 2010, according to data posted online by the Bureau of the Public Debt and confirmed by a spokesperson for the agency.

Fiscal Year 1958, the first year of the run, saw a debt increase of $5.8 billion, a paltry sum these days.  Since then, the cumulative debt increase has been $13.3 trillion.
Although the GOP has been complicit in this drunken-sailor spending binge, the events of the past two years have shown that the Democrats are ideologically devoted to spending without restraint. 
The GOP needs to understand that many of the people who will be voting for them this time will be doing so as the most efficient means of stopping the runaway Democrat train, and not necessarily because they trust the Republicans.
GOP, you'll have two years to earn the trust of these folks.  That's not long, so you'd better not dawdle.

The Global Debt Crisis Explained, sort of

I had not heard of Clarke and Dawe before, but I love the way they “explain” the impossibly tangled web of debt that may bring down one economy after another.

Various countries in Europe are the first to falter, but the US appears to be heading for the precipice as well.  Bloomberg, June 4:

U.S.’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP

President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”

The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades.

“Over the long term, interest rates on government debt will likely have to rise to attract investors,” said Hiroki Shimazu, a market economist in Tokyo at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s third-largest publicly traded bank. “That will be a big burden on the government and the people.”

Click on the “Graphic” tab at the above link to view the chart.