Regardless of how little or how much the Democrats gain in the midterm elections Donald Trump will not have a congress that can legislate what he wants done in the country going forward. So, what’s a great disrupter to do?
I think Donald should declare a state of emergency and fix some stuff. I think he should use this state of emergency to balance the budget. Unilaterally. Unashamedly. I guess it would be a revolutionary move. But it’s needed. The country has been bled dry by the titanic waste of the federal budget and waiting anymore time would be dangerous. Now it’s not possible to eliminate a seventy trillion-dollar debt overnight. It will take decades to do that. But it seems necessary to at least make a start. It’s shocking to think that the last balanced budget was under, of all people, Bill Clinton. Of course, the “War on Terror” put an end to that but for the last quarter century American politicians have pretended that printing money endlessly was their God-given right. Well, it’s not. And acting like it is has brought us to the brink of hyperinflation. So, calling it a state of emergency is, in my opinion, completely accurate.
Now, this would be a very large undertaking. Slicing the budget down to size without undermining the stability of the economy or causing undue pain to the taxpayers requires the wisdom of a Solomon. DOGE had the right idea about eliminating boondoggles, leftist set asides and waste but it was just the tip of the iceberg. There are over a hundred years of malfeasance and stupidity in that seventy trillion-dollar debt and it will be necessary to close down whole governmental departments and cancel thousands of projects that either we don’t need or we can’t afford. So, there will be many, many oxen gored during this effort.
Luckily, the most important asset for an operation of this nature is a very skilled salesman; someone who can sell the idea based on the belief that the ones benefitting from all this waste is anyone else than the long-suffering American taxpayer. There’s nothing a taxpayer likes more to hear than that all those “leeches” out there are about to be removed from the federal budget and forced to do honest work or starve. So, Trump can sell this based on the idea that trimming the waste will drive inflation down to a very tolerable minimum and eventually taxes can also begin to drop. Not immediately of course. The accountants have to figure out how long it takes to reduce seventy trillion dollars to zero.
Now I’ve been told that not having a debt is actually bad for the country and the world. Well, I kinda don’t believe it. Sure, government bonds and bills are a very attractive way to spread the costs of expensive programs and systems over the course of several years but making believe that a balanced budget is a bad thing doesn’t add up for me. It’s one thing to buy a dishwasher on time. It’s an entirely different thing to be in hock to loan sharks for amounts you can never pay back. Donald put the United States on a permanent diet. It’s an emergency.