Debt ceiling is rising again: What is Democrats’ answer?

Such was the headline on the local editorial page Sunday. Their answer is the same, raise taxes on the ‘rich’. Raise taxes by creating more of them and increasing those that already exist. Don’t renew the tax cuts that are bringing record revenues to the treasury. Create open-ended entitlement programs and include millions of border crashers and their extended families in these programs.The deficit is a topic that is ripe for the majority party to demagogue, but there are two undeniable truths that they would rather you not know about or understand in order for their demagoguery to work.

  1. When you are the biggest fish in the sea, any increase will always be the largest, record-breaking statistic. That is not bad, it is just a fact of arithmetic. Being the largest of anything doesn’t make you evil, it does however cause people like Hillary Clinton to call for seizing your property. Recall Exxon’s P&L every year. (I want to take those profits to use for ….) Likewise, every year, as spending programs are invented, and borrowing increases, the dollar amount of the spending reaches a record level.
  2. As a percentage of GDP, the current deficit isn’t out of line with the current or previous administrations. And that is including all the financial costs of waging war and the Gulf Coast hurricane recovery billions. Similarly, Exxon’s profit margin is not out of line with the industry or their own financial history. It remains around 9 to 10 percent of sales.

The unfortunate (and deliberate) outcome of our educational system today is that our children, from Workman Middle School to UWF (and the media’s editorial writers) can’t tell the difference between a profit and a profit margin or what makes capitalism work.

Don’t look for Democrats in Washington to be fiscally conservative anytime soon. As spendthrift as Bush has been already, they are complaining that it isn’t enough.

A favorite quote of mine on taxing and spending comes from Winston Churchill. “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

related: PNJ, Debt ceiling is rising again: What is Democrats’ answer? Breitbart, Federal Deficit Sharply Lower

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