◼ link - Mark Steyn/OC Register
Have you seen the official White House version of what the New York Times headline writers call "A Responsible Budget"? My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on Page 58 of their 500-page appendix on "Analytical Perspectives." This is entitled "Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections." It's a straight line going straight up before disappearing off the top right hand corner of the graph in the year 2084 and continuing northeast straight through your eye socket, out the back of your skull and zooming up to rendezvous with Newt's space colony on the moon circa 2100. Just to emphasize, this isn't the doom-laden dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it's the official Oval Office version of where America's headed. In the New York Times-approved "responsible budget" there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the debt curve into something approaching re-entry with reality....
The received wisdom among media cynics is that Obama has engaged in an ingenious bit of misdirection by seizing on a pop-culture caricature of Republicans and inviting them to live up to it: Those uptight squares with the hang-ups about fornication have decided to force you to lead the same cheerless sex lives as them....
It may well be that the Democrats succeed in establishing this narrative. But anyone who falls for it is a sap. In fact, these two issues – the Obama condoms-for-clunkers giveaway and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 900 percent by 2075 – are not unconnected. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren – i.e., an upside-down family tree. As I wrote a few weeks ago, "If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars' worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off?" Most analysts know the answer to that question: Greece is demographically insolvent.
Americans foolish enough to fall for the Democrats' crude bit of misdirection can hardly complain about their rendezvous with the sharp end of that page 58 budget graph. People are free to buy bacon, and free to buy condoms. But the state has no compelling interest to force either down your throat. The notion that an all-powerful government would distract from its looming bankruptcy by introducing a universal contraceptive mandate would strike most novelists as almost too pat in its symbolism. It's like something out of "Brave New World." Except that it's cowardly, and, like so much else about the sexual revolution, very old and wrinkled.
