Spending our Grandchildren’s Future

With the looming threat of immediate government shutdown avoided, the nation once again finds itself bloated and wasteful on an all-you-can-eat buffet of raided social security funds and foreign-held debt. And there’s no sign of it stopping anytime soon.

When Senator Rand Paul pushed for a balanced budget during his 2010 Senate race, he pushed for the “penny plan,” which would balance the budget by cutting a little over 1 percent of government spending. Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, the government grew, and the $12 trillion in debt of 2010 is now $35 trillion in 2024.

So it should come as no surprise that when Senator Paul introduced his “penny plan” once again, it didn’t call for cutting 1 or 2 cents out of every federal dollar but has grown to over 6 cents a dollar. To make matters worse, the appetite to cut spending and the glooming debt bomb is even lower than in 2010.

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Unsurprisingly, the costs of goods are rising, and economic certainty is wavering as the country continues to take out debt and leave the bill for future generations. And with Social Security rapidly approaching insolvency in the next decade, it will get worse before it gets better.

For our part, American Action Fund is standing firm on the need for fiscal sanity, and while we predominantly focus on the state level, it’s a key metric we follow in determining membership to our Hazlitt Coalition. We know that by changing the pool of elected officials at the state level, we help establish the environment that influences if not feeds the next generation of U.S. Congressmen.

The more we put off this issue, the more painful it becomes, but the failures of the past to address this vital issue do not mean we shouldn’t remain diligent and principled in our push toward fiscal responsibility and a stable, prosperous economy.