That huge fed debt increase? They’ve already used 60 percent of it

By David McElroy · August 5, 2011

Early in my college years, I’d never had a credit card. I’d never had a full-time job and I’d also never needed credit. But I was walking through a Sears store at University Mall in Tuscaloosa one day when an attractive girl stopped me to talk. It turned out she was working for Sears, getting people to apply for credit cards.

The pitch was simple. There was some kind of gift — of marginal value, I’m sure — that she would give me if I’d just fill out the application. Plus, she said, she would make some money if I just applied. I explained to her that I wasn’t working and didn’t have any income, so I obviously wasn’t who they wanted. But she said it would help her, so I relented. I’d get a free gift — and how many college boys find it easy to say, “no,” to pretty college girls?

I forgot all about it, but one day before long I received a shiny new Sears credit card in the mail with my name on it. The credit limit was $350, if I remember correctly. What did I do? Did I tuck the card away to use in case I really needed something? Did I hold onto it to use a little here and there to build credit by paying the bill responsibly? No way. I went out that very moment and bought a VCR that I couldn’t afford, maxing out the card in the process.

I spent the next five years or so paying that VCR off, making the minimum payment most of the time and probably paying three times what it was worth.

Uncle Sam has had a credit card before, but he’s no more responsible than my 19-year-old self was. Just this week, Congress gave the Obama administration authority to borrow more money. On Tuesday, the feds went on a wild borrowing spree, pushing the national debt up by $239 billion — eating up 60 percent of the newly authorized borrowing.

I hope we get more out of it than a lousy, overpriced VCR, but I doubt it.

Politicians like to talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, but their actions say entirely different things. The truth is that politicians like to spend money. They like to spend other people’s money. Better yet, they like to spend money that they’ve borrowed and insist that other people pay back.

Anyone who believes that there’s any chance of stopping the runaway freight train of federal debt is living on Fantasy Island. Anyone who believes that any politician — of any party — can change things is just denying reality.

We’re heading quickly toward economic collapse. Thursday’s market plunge was a tiny tremor. Politicians and unelected bureaucrats will keep pumping up the economy by inflating the money supply and borrowing every nickel they can get their hands on, but it’s not going to be enough. Whether it’s this year or next year or five years from now, the bubble will burst. It’s going to be ugly when it happens.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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