David McElroy

We keep hearing about the European debt crisis, but most of us know fairly little about it. All we know is that things are bad enough that The European Union has been considered on the verge of collapse over the issue and that Greece and Italy are the worst offenders. (Ireland is said to be pretty sick now, too.)

So what do we make of this chart from the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget? (Click the chart above if you’d like to see it at a bigger size.) According to the chart, the per capita debt of the United States is already worse than that of Europe’s supposed basket case countries. What does that say about us?

According to Republicans on the Budget Committee, U.S. per capita debt would jump all the way to $75,000 by 2022 under Barack Obama’s proposed budget. Look at the other four charts on that page as well. If those numbers don’t scare you, you’re either too jaded to care or else you believe (as I do) that the debt will never be paid back, because the government will default at some point.

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Cleaning out the notebook again…

Cable news can rot your brain and make you crazy. A place where I’ve been going a lot recently almost always has a TV on cable news. After being subjected to this garbage for awhile, I sort of understand why so many people favor going to war — or at least “intervening” — in countries with oppressive dictators. The simplistic, emotional and context-free reports from television leave the impression that the obvious right thing to do is to intervene.

It seems that most people have seen so many simplistic television shows and movies — and TV news mirrors that simplicity — that they believe fixing complex problems is simple and easy. It’s maddening, because the solutions aren’t as easy as implied by the narratives laid out on news channels.

Speaking of wars, I’m worry about what’s going on in Iran. I’m not making a prediction about what’s going to happen there, because there are too many possible scenarios. But I can see the very real possibility of it leading to a large war that most people don’t want — all because the small players there are aligned with bigger powers outside the region.

If Israel attacks Iran, there’s a possibility that Russia could try to intervene to defend Iran. The Russians have already been warning Israel not to attack. If Russia gets involved — which might not even happen, of course — there’s going to be a lot of internal pressure here for the United States to get involved on the other side. Wasn’t there some big war nearly a hundred years ago that was triggered by an assassination simply because big powers were aligned with the players in a smaller-scale conflict? The Iran-Israel conflict isn’t exactly the same, but it’s similar enough to bring World War I to mind for me.

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When I got into politics professionally more than 20 years ago, I learned one thing pretty quickly. The worst people in the business to trust were the ones who talked a lot about being Christians and talked about being on a mission from God to change the world by getting elected.

Those were the people most likely to try to cheat me. They were the ones most likely to cut corners and justify their “little” dishonesties with the justification that they were trying to do God’s will. As a Christian, that sickened me. I learned that I could trust most of the rest of the folks in the business. If they had been around for awhile — even if you knew they were liars and thieves — you knew there was an “honor among thieves” that you could mostly count on.

Politicians such as Rick Santorum scare me. It’s partly because of his cavalier willingness to use government force to impose his judgment on other people while spouting rhetoric about liberty. But even more than that, it scares me that he seems to believe he’s on a mission from God.

In a speech four years ago at a Catholic university in Florida, Santorum laid out his view of the world. In his version, the United States is on God’s side. The parts of the world that oppose this country are evil. He seems to have missed the point that when God sees a sinful and fallen world, that includes us, too. Instead, he sees a holy and righteous United States — led by the U.S. government, of course — on God’s side. He said:

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