The National Debt

It's tax day tomorrow, which usually means a long lineup at the post office branches that stay open late to handle the crush. I mailed my returns off this afternoon.

I'm reading White House Burning, which I recommend to anyone perplexed by the ongoing political divide between those on either side of the national debt debate.

This also involves the even fiercer debate about the proper size and role of the federal government, including the extreme views of those like Ron Paul, who would essentially like to shrink the monstrously huge Uncle Sam down to more the size of a pygmy, I suppose.

I'm not accustomed to taking sides in this philosophical debate, because I partly agree with both camps. The federal government is too big, unwieldy, and intrusive.

As one who has been abused by unjustified, yet hard to win IRS audits, I probably resent big government as much as any American. Plus I hate financial waste of all kinds, and I have observed first-hand as a former Washington D.C. bureau chief how much bureaucratic waste chokes the federal agencies inside the Beltway.

Still, I have a heart as well as a brain and it is easy to see how much human misery resides amongst great wealth here in The Land of the Free. Too many people simply cannot compete according to the way the rules of the game are set up in the USA.

And the rules are too often rigged by those smart and aggressive enough to do so.

The kinds of abuse we've witnessed of ordinary people by financial institutions in our time is staggering. Basic fairness has been abandoned by those seeking only to enrich themselves.

Government regulation -- or rather the lack thereof -- is a significant causal factor.

What we badly need is a new kind of resolution of the ancient debate that, as this book documents, dates back to the founding of our Republic. Hamilton v. Jefferson, it could be called.

Most people adhere to one extreme or the other, I fear, when both are both partly right and partly wrong. When Obama was elected in 2008, my great hope was that he would prove to be a great consensus-builder.

The gravity of our economic problems were easily apparent then. Four years later, IMHO, our problems are much, much worse, because no consensus has emerged, just more echo-chamber extremism on both sides.

Once he dispatches Romney this November, which will happen if for no other reason than the Gender Gap, Obama needs to step up his game, and start acting like the centrist he truly is.

We need a President who both slashes government waste and entitlements, leads the fight to fix Social Security and Medicare (a combined one-third of the overall government spending), resolves the debt problem, and rights the course going forward on our growing annual deficits.

It's no small challenge. But that's what is at stake in this election, and there is no evidence Romney is up to it. One can debate whether Obama is, either, but at least as a second-term incumbent, he will have a much better chance to take the requisite political risks than another raw beginner.

At least that is my take.

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