Tim Wildmon
AFA president
June 2011 – “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
Scarlett O’Hara, from Gone With the Wind
American Family Association is known for taking on moral issues such as abortion, the homosexual agenda, religious freedom, judicial activism and immorality in the media. And these are still at the top of agenda items. But earlier this year I heard Speaker of the House John Boehner make the case that the debt crisis our country faces is, in fact, a moral problem as well. I agree.
In case you missed it, listen to what Erskine Bowles, chairman of President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and chief of staff for former President Bill Clinton, said before a congressional committee in March:
“I’m really concerned. I think we face the most predictable economic crisis in history. A lot of us sitting in this room didn’t see this last crisis as it came upon us. But this one is really easy to see. The fiscal path we are on today is simply not sustainable.
“This debt and these deficits that we are incurring on an annual basis are like a cancer and they are truly going to destroy this country from within unless we have the common sense to do something about it.”
I give credit to President Obama for appointing this commission. But President Obama is now acting like he has never heard of Erskine Bowles. It is truly remarkable that, in this crisis, we are seeing absolutely zero leadership from the president.
Fellow Democrat, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, made a speech citing the need to preserve federal spending for the cowboy poet’s annual convention in Nevada. (Yes, I’m serious.)
So, if we experience the “cancer” that Mr. Bowles warns about, we only have ourselves to blame. Over the years, “We the people” have voted into office the very ones who have brought us to the edge of the abyss.
President Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and a Republican Congress, financially, left us in pretty good shape just over a decade ago. Clinton’s executive experience as a governor having to balance budgets and work with legislatures helped the process. President George W. Bush and the congresses he worked with share some blame in racking up the breathtaking debt our country has now incurred. But President Obama’s spending has made Bush look like a tightwad. Obama is Bush on multiple steroids. In one single year, President Obama has increased the debt by the same percentage that President Bush had in four years.
To demonstrate how much money we are talking about, if you had spent $1 million each day since the birth of Jesus Christ, you would have spent nearly ¾ of a trillion dollars. America is now over $13 trillion in debt. Our national credit cards are maxed out, we have no money, the house payment is overdue and the leader of United States Senate is worried about the cowboy poet’s convention not getting government aid.
Whatever good they may claim to stand for, liberal politicians are absolute tax-and-spend addicts. They cannot control themselves. They are checked only by conservatives, and when there are not enough conservatives to stop them, they are like children in a candy store with no adults around. Consider the two-year spending binge of Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Reid the last two years that has brought us to this point. The American people are appalled at this reckless behavior and rebuked Obama and the Democrats last November by turning countless liberals out of office.
After Obama’s State of the Union address in January, the Washington Post, a liberal newspaper, wrote this: “The White House may have decided that debt reduction is so tough it has to await what officials, speaking not for attribution, have termed a ‘forcing event.’”
Think about that. The WP did not define what kind of “forcing event” the president might be waiting for. And they did not say what kind of actions he might attempt to take in the wake of this “forcing event.” But it sounds ominous.
It could be that a lot of liberal politicians know what Erskine Bowles is saying is true. But these politicians figure they are not going to be around anyway when America’s financial system comes crumbling down so why go through the pain and angst of telling people they can’t have everything they’ve always had, compliments of the American taxpayer. In other words – they really don’t care about America’s future.
I know that is a sinister view of Washington, but I am beginning to believe it. I wish I didn’t. But how else do you explain people who want to keep spending when they are up to their eyeballs in debt? 
