Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Howdy Sailor: Bush has learned from his alcoholic days and has sworn off drinking. Now if we could only get him to cease his drunken spending habits.

I was kind of hoping that Bush would use his lame-duck second term to bring the budget back into order without having to worry about re-election. Granted, most of his spending proposals are political promises geared for his November re-election. But the extent of the $3-trillion expense indicates he has no plan to cut spending and hopes voodoo economics will keep the budget in check.

We've heard a lot about this being the largest deficit in U.S. history. That's true, but only in terms of dollar figures. As a percentage of the budget, it's not much bigger than past deficits. So we're not in an emergency situation yet.

But that doesn't mean we should wait until a crisis emerges. We were only able to balance the budget in the 1990s because of the economic anomaly of the tech boom. That's not likely to happen again, regardless of who's president.

We need to condition our economy to live with less government spending. Otherwise, as entitlements and political promises increase, we may need to take drastic measures to rein in exploding debt, causing permanent damage to our nation's economy.