Recently, Lee Doren of CEI covered the “Wealth Inequality in America” video that went viral. In the feedback section of my blog, a liberal drive-by commenter said that I appeared to be an “elitist” for suggesting that the makers of the video purposefully muddied the waters between “income” and “wealth” because I believe large swathes of the public doesn’t particularly make a distinction between the two.
I rejected that claim because the truth is not elitist. Likewise, politicians know this is the truth, which is why you have Sen. Dick Durbin talking about deficits when he was specifically asked about debt.
Liberals are masters at twisting and contorting language until people throw up their hands in frustration or simply go along with whatever definition they’ve come up with on that day.
Note this exchange on March 17 between Sen. Durbin and Chris Wallace:
Chris Wallace: Sen. Durbin, when candidate Obama said that [$9 trillion in debt was “unpatriotic”], our national debt was $9 trillion. It’s now $16 trillion. So the question is: If it was unpatriotic at $9 trillion, is it sustainable at $16 trillion?
Dick Durbin: “Chris, here’s the good news: We’ve reduced the long term deficit by about 2.4 trillion dollars. That’s included only $6 billion in new revenue [i.e., tax hikes] as part of the fiscal cliff. We still have to do more, but we’ve taken the edge off the crisis, I’ll concede that. What the president is pointing to is this: We need strong economic recovery. We need to put Americans back to work. That’s our first priority. Deficit reduction I would put as the second priority and one that is coupled with economic growth. So I think we can do both. Make sure we have deficit reduction, but don’t cut too much, too fast.
Take for example the sequestration. Seven hundred thousand American jobs will be lost. This is not the thing to do and not the right time to do it. We’ve got to phase this in and sequence it so that we have economic growth and Americans paying taxes.
As I’ve said before, when Washington officials lament “cuts,” what they’re really talking about is going into debt at a slower rate than they would like.
Think of the federal government or the national debt like a tumor. It grows and it grows and it grows. At some point, even the operation needed to save the life of the afflicted could end up resulting in death. The tumor gets too close or attached to vital organs. Too much blood loss would occur if it was removed by anyone except the most skilled surgeon. The body has grown too weak to survive attempts to excise the cancer.
That is where the United States finds itself today, and it’s precisely what men like Dick Durbin are counting on. If they can continue to play word games long enough, the tumor will grow. And in this tale Durbin plays a deranged doctor who knows he can keep prescribing the wrong medicine and collecting his patient’s cash because he will be long gone by the time the body goes into cardiac arrest.
Sen. Durbin has talked to all the actuaries. He has seen all the numbers by the CBO, OMB, etc. He knows the interest on the national debt alone will break us at some point in the not-to-distant future. And yet he continues to misinform the American people.
America is sick right now, and millions of citizens don’t realize that they’ve hired the political equivalent of Jack Kevorkian to heal the nation.
Barring some sort of technological breakthrough that changes the country’s fiscal trajectory, this will end badly. And when it does, history must note that men like Sen. Durbin willingly allowed it to happen.
