Written By : John Hawkins

“That’s the real crisis – the unemployment, not the deficit. We don’t have a deficit problem right now. In the long term, we have a deficit problem – we’ve got to get it under control but not right now. — Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)

Here’s a newspaper headline from a yellowing cutting I found up in the attic:

U.S. Budget Deficit Hits Record $438 Billion For Year

Boy, those were the days! Flappers in rumble seats, wind-up victrolas, and deficits you could measure in billions. A more innocent age, lost in the mists of time. Gosh, you’d have to be pushing, oh, twelve even to remember it.

$438 billion was the record-breaking federal deficit in 2008. That’s all of three years ago. In 2011, it’s getting on four times as big. — Mark Steyn

All Jerrold Nadler is doing there is saying what other liberals really think. It’s actually a little refreshing because liberals usually claim to care about the deficit and then fight any and all attempts to do anything about it. If every liberal Democrat in Congress — which is pretty much all of them — were honest enough to admit that they don’t think there’s a serious deficit problem, it would be good for the country.

Why? Because then, we could have an honest debate and voters would have a crystal clear choice.

We have a deficit four times bigger than the all-time record from 2008, the President is claiming he may not have the money to send out Social Security checks next month, and it’s entirely possible we could lose our AAA rating at almost any time. In addition, we’ve got a 14 trillion dollar debt and 100 trillion dollars in unfunded entitlement programs.

Conservatives are of the opinion that those are dire problems that could lead to bankruptcy within a decade or two, if not sooner, and that would turn the American Dream into an American nightmare. We also believe that raising taxes will slow the economy without raising a massive amount of new revenue, so we have no choice other than to find a way to dramatically cut our expenditures on entitlement programs.

Liberals believe we can spend as much as we want indefinitely and there’s nothing to worry about because we can raise taxes sky high, particularly on the rich, and that will solve all of our problems without significantly reducing economic growth. They also believe that the size of our deficits isn’t a short or medium term problem, although most liberals would probably agree that at some point, far in the future, someone will probably have to cut spending somehow.

That’s really where both sides stand. Why not put it out there without all the spin and let the American people make a real choice?

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