(12-31-2019, 01:04 AM)pirkster Wrote: Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Yet more reason why Congress needs to go back to actual budgeting with proper spending bills instead of the nonsense they've pulled since the Democrat resurgence of 1998.  The current way of doing business is how nonsense like this gets slipped in where no one notices, where it never belonged to begin with.

Yet, there are few Republicans who even care anymore.  Their foes have endlessly run as Santa Claus and viciously attacked any fiscal responsibility efforts.  It's been a losing issue that no one wants to touch because they lose office/power at the very mention of fiscal responsibility.

Thomas Massie is one of only maybe a handful of people on either side that doesn't seem suffer from demanding fiscal reform.

Unsustainable federal spending is the greatest threat to our great nation, and there's not even any close second

You're totally right about the part in bold.
This is not just about spending or the minimum age for smoking, it's also about the voting rights act, campaign finance legislation, the federal communications act, The clean air Act, and many other acts, that are out of date to the point that the commissioners enforcing them have to kind of make stuff up if they're going to enforce them at all.  Congress has been asleep at the switch for at least 20 years. That means the president and judges are making our policy now.

Regarding the part in italic, you're wrong. Money is just paper that we use to buy stuff. As long as this nation keeps producing oil, and airplanes, softwoods, and soybeans, and all this other stuff that the rest of the world needs, the deficit is not going to be a thing.  Look at Japan. They have much more debt than us, in a smaller GDP, and they don't even have oil, but they are fine. you might be scared that some hostile government like China would buy all of our debt and then do something bad to us, but that would hurt China more than it would hurt us.
The biggest threat to our nation it comes from the bolded part - pretty soon the executive or the judges are going to overreach so much that Congress is not even going to matter. And pretty soon after that one of the presidents will say, "hey we don't need to have an election this year," and no one will stop him.

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