Facing Consequences: What It Mean When You’ve Been Living Beyond Your Means

Let’s see if I can present a reasonably accurate description of the situation that is occurring ubiquitously throughout the United States. And by ubiquitous I do mean everywhere. It will not be surprising to you, once identified, that this situation has a national scope. The situation’s reach is pervasive in our governmental system; and while I do not maintain that the situation effects every governmental organization regardless of jurisdictional levels and across the entire range of size and geography, it does reach into the majority. The “situation” is the un-affordability of governmental structures and operations. I am not proposing that every individual and every type of governmental organization conceivable is by it’s nature unaffordable (though that is hard to avoid), only that in the US we have been sufficiently complacent to allow most such structures to have evolved into unprecedented levels of un-affordability.

This un-affordability of Government operations has surfaced under the harsh light of hard economic times. Politicians (of most any stripe) and bureaucrats will maintain and say that the current budget short-fall (read that un-affordable) situation is only because of the hard economic conditions that we are experiencing at the moment. And they will add that once the economy recovers then we can return to the normal operations which we had before the downturn. This position lets them help allay the inconveniences, difficulties and pain that spending cut-backs and lay-offs are causing throughout municipal, state and federal entities.

They were and are not incorrect in that the problems that have surfaced were because of the near catastrophic financial contraction of the economy, but they appear to continue to turn a blind-eye (I prefer, dead-brain) to the real problem. That real problem, it’s that US citizens are allowed to be unaccountable for their choices and are unwilling to accept the consequences of their demands upon government entities. We elect politicians who promise not to spend more money, who will not raise taxes, and who will make sure that our tax dollars are not wasted on unnecessary programs. Then once they get into office they do nothing to curb costs, they find essential reasons to create some new spending program or government task that requires additional funding, and they add a special interest earmark that they add each time a new bill comes before them. Gradually they pile more and more costs onto the budget and then complain how there is nothing that they can do to prevent it.

Compound this spendthrift approach to an illogical expectation that once we get through these economic problems that we will have learned our lessons and not let ourselves get into this situation again. We will be wise and prudent and not spend more than we can afford. After all, we have shown that after every previous time when we had gotten into a dire economic situation or when the cost of government was clearly more than what was affordable that we recognized the problem and did not allow it to happen again. OOPS! How did we get here again? We lived beyond our governmental affordability. We let the politicians and bureaucrats find ways to spend more and more and more. These illustrious leaders did these things sometimes with our eager agreement, sometimes because we were afraid, and sometimes because we were blissfully ignorant of what they were doing. But they were only able to do it because we are willing to elect such as these as our representatives. We are willing to hope that we will not have to pay the price for what we want and that it will come from someone else’s pocket. Well, we are as wrong as the anointed and elected few.

Do I expect that we will learn to do better from this situation? I do not! I think that we will go right back to beliveing that we can just choose what we want and not worry about what it really is costing us. I believe that we will ignore responsibility and thoughtful decision-making because it is hard and the people we elect are not trained in these techniques, nor are they aware of their limitations.