For the past three years the United States Senate, under the leadership of Obama toady Harry Reid, has been an embarrassment for the United States.
Now the so-called “Upper Body” has merely kicked the can down the road for two months on an extension of the payroll tax cut, and the House has rightly rejected the Senate’s maneuver.
Americans need to kick the Harry Reid Senate down the road not for a period of months, but for a lifetime. We have a clear message for Harry Reid and his utter failure to lead the Senate: The nation is angry and our anger is directed at a legislative body that under Reid’s leadership can’t do its job.
Reid seems to think that his job is to force the Senate to follow Barack Obama’s agenda. That would mean the Senate is obliged to put a rubber stamp on the president’s destructive fiscal policies.
He’s wrong.
The U.S. Senate is not Obama’s footstool. The Upper Body needs to do what the late Bill Buckley once counseled the nation -- put up a red flag and yell “Stop!”
The United States is so drowning in red ink that the monstrous debt this administration and our spendthrift Congress have amassed cannot be repaid even if America survives another century.
Washington has saddled not only our children with a horrific debt, they have put it on the shoulders of several generations yet to be born.
As we have just witnessed in Greece, the days of reckoning inevitably arrive for all spendthrifts. The piper must be paid, and he won’t wait forever to collect his monetary due.
Not long ago somebody asked a group of female Obama supporters how they think the United States can run up huge debts without going bankrupt.
They replied that President Obama would see to it that the debts would be paid. Asked where the money would come from, they replied that Obama would come up with the money. Asked where he would find the money they replied that he would pay out of his “stash.”
They don’t seem to understand that Obama hasn’t got a “stash.” What money he controls is our money -- our tax dollars -- and that kitty, thanks to Washington’s squandermania, is just about empty.
Such widespread ignorance of the facts of financial life seems to be widespread. Americans appear to have bought into the idea that Uncle Sam merely has to print more and more money to keep us afloat on the financial seas.
It has not seemed to have occurred to such people that the government printing presses cannot keep turning out paper money with nothing like silver or gold behind it without participating in a Ponzi scheme to end all Ponzi schemes.
Paper money is exactly that: paper. And that’s how the world sees it even if Americans don’t.
In the past our excursions into fiscal insanity have survived became Washington kept kicking the can down the road. That’s over. We’re reaching the end of that road. Our sole hope of survival is to deny Obama and his toadies in the Congress another four years; otherwise we’ll make Greece look like the world’s most fiscally solvent nation.
It’s time to wave the red flag and yell “stop” as loudly as we can.
(Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.)