So, the government is facing scores of trillions in unfunded liabilities. We’re going to have to start using scientific notation in our political debates: “Obama Proposes Raising Debt Ceiling by $2 x 1012.” Next up: “A quadrillion here, a quadrillion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”
And what’s one prominent Democratic congressman’s answer to this systemic problem, our Crisis of the 21st Century? Why, legalize pot, illegal aliens, and Internet gambling, naturally. Rep. Jared Polis offers these ideas as an antidote to the current debate, which he describes as “a political sideshow, as mere percentage points are shaved from spending bills that in total comprise only a small fraction of the federal budget,” as though his own suggestions are anything but a political sideshow that, even taken at face value, would shave mere fractions of percentage points off our deficit.
Steyn is right to bemoan the lack of seriousness of our whole political class in facing the abyss before us. But there are different levels of unseriousness — if too many Republican congressmen can be considered mere adolescents in their dawning understanding of the grown-up problems we face, too many Democrats aren’t even out of diapers yet.