Treble displays of fiscal irresponsibility

We erect goals and constraints around our own behavior in order to, at least, have benchposts of responsibility.  It's not always that we attain these goals, but they serve to remind us of where we are headed, and to instruct us when we have strayed.

So, families write our household budgets, businesses set sales goals, athletes have training schedules.  No one is perfect, but at least w know the ideal.



In Washington, however, where absolutely unrestrained spending and debt are in vogue, the fashion of the moment is to dispense even with the notion of setting goals, or any yardstick at all by which to measure our success or failure at fiscal restraint.  Thus, the notion of limiting government by any measure  at all is being entirely discarded.  This is frightening.

• The U.S. Senate has not enacted a budget in more than three years.
• President Obama has announced he will for the third time fail to meet his constitutional obligation to produce a budget by the Constitutional deadline of February 4.
• Both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner believe we should entirely dispose of the federal debt ceiling, raising forever any legislative limit on the amount of debt the U.S. can amass.

Wow.  And these are the people in whom we have entrusted the fiscal affairs of this nation.  Think about it.