Why do our elected officials so often act like children?

by Brian Kelly 

The simple answer is because they can. The people permit it. Unfortunately, elected children do control our government. No wonder we have the mess we have. Our parents would tell them to “grow up!” That sure sounds like the right medicine, doesn’t it?
Let us examine in simple terms, what is in play when our top officials go through cunning contortions, such as the debt ceiling, sequestration, and continuing resolutions, to prove they can control their own behavior. Like parents trying to discipline children, Congress places restrictions on its own behavior. Then it pays no attention to its restrictions, violates the restrictions, asks for forgiveness, gets more spending money, and then, so it can again appear to be on the right track, it reestablishes the restrictions.
Like real children, our Congress and the president unequivocally make a promise to their benefactor, the American people. They promise no longer to spend more than their allowance for let’s say just two weeks in a row. Additionally, they agree to a specific penalty, which some might call sequestration, in the event that they go over their allowance after just two weeks. Suppose their “allowance rule” is that they agree that if they overspend their allowance, they get no allowance the third week. Would they keep their promise? Keep that in mind to understand this full analogy!
At the end of each two week period, the “children” never abide by their own rules. They always come back to the benefactor and they plead successfully to have the deal made sweeter. Their sequestration, if you will, is never enforced. So, they never learn.

As children, they cannot control their desire to over-spend. They are never hurt by their rules, and so, they cry bloody murder if somebody comes anywhere close to enforcing the or-else part of their bargain.
So, they keep changing the rules to get increases in their spending allowances, and they never get penalized with their personal sequestration (no allowance the third week). Eventually, after being excused from their commitments each time, their rules expand beyond anybody’s expectations. Instead of the original rule, it becomes bigger and permits much more spending.
So, let’s say they are permitted to spend a hundred times more than their original allowance in two weeks and this becomes their new bogey. Again, they agree not to take any allowance in the third week if they overspend this huge bogey. Does this sound like our Congress?
As the two weeks go by, even at this 100X level, they cannot keep their spending within this significantly greater amount. They have never been forced into the penalty box, and though they love the constraints, they love breaking free of the constraints even more.
Since never penalized for exceeding each level of spending allowance, these undisciplined spoiled brats are emboldened to take bigger allowances each week. Their benefactor (US in this case) appears powerless to stop their spending.

Does this not seem to be the very same relationship that our Congress and president enjoy with the real debt ceiling, sequestration, and continuing resolution deadlines? Like spoiled little children, they pay no attention and they are never punished. Low information voters have no idea what is going on, while intelligent citizens know they are being hoodwinked.
Just as these spoiled children, the Congress and the president get to change the rules in the same fashion. They give us some mumbo jumbo about how, without a rule change, we will all be hurt, and so we let them get away with it. The media, which are rooting very hard for the US to become a fully socialist state, write hit pieces blaming Republicans and glorifying the selfishness of the Congress. They always exonerate the president who is always on their side. Consequently, the masses are not alarmed about the inconvenient truths of our fiscal largesse, since the press has abdicated its role to inform US.
Kids cannot discipline themselves, but Congress is made up of adults that should have the will power. Yet, each time either exceed their own agreed-upon limits, they choose to give themselves special permissions to exceed them by even more the next time. This is not how such constraints are supposed to work.
The debt ceiling, for example, sequestration, and budgets are valid instruments, and they are designed to be immobile and binding. These are limits and constraints set by Congress on itself. The debt limit is an amount, for example, beyond which the national debt shall not rise. Sequestration is the denial of budget dollars for not doing one’s job.

For the national debt ceiling in particular, it rises when politicians, acting just like children, cannot constrain their spending, and the treasury must then borrow from China and elsewhere to pay for their frivolity.
Periodically, the Congress and the president in concert, choose to raise the debt ceiling rather than tackling the over-spending problem. This allows the spoiled brats, who spend beyond the permitted limits of the people, to get another whack at our treasury.
Now in 2013, there our treasury is empty because the people we trusted to take care of the treasury have been untrustworthy. They raise the limit as high as they want and come back to raise it again. Each time, our grandchildren are presented with a larger invoice, and their parents and their parent’s parents receive no value in the bargain.
Since our government pays only lip service to the debt ceiling, the only value it has today is to make the people aware that our highest officials are not doing their jobs. As such, it is still a helpful tool to use to manage the country’s spending. Unfortunately, the people, many of whom are comfortable being in the low information category, do not have enough resolve to purge Washington of the big spenders when they violate our controls.
The liberal / progressives want to do away with the debt ceiling so they can spend in an unlimited fashion with impunity. Wouldn’t any of us like to have an unlimited credit card that we could pretend never needed to be paid back? Yet, eventually, we would run out of other people’s money. And so has our nation.

In mid January 2013, before Congress and the president gave a four month reprieve to the debt ceiling crisis, the president decided to blame Republicans for the crisis and for the sequestration. Ironically, the sequestration was Obama’s very own idea. Regarding the debt limit, he offered some calumny to show just how little he cares about veterans, the troops in the field, and the elderly.
He said he would stop checks to these, the most deserving of Americans, simply to show that he could. And he blamed the Republicans because he knows that low information voters have been programmed to hate Republicans. And, so, our dishonest president has used the lie effectively and he has lived to fight another day.
Conservatives know that each time progressive liberals, running under the cover of the Democrat Party, demand that we raise the limit and add more debt, they hurt our children and our grandchildren and our legacy. Our legacy becomes responsible to pay a larger share of their incomes over their lifetimes to cover their parents’ wastefulness.
This debt is so heavy; it will be for eternity. Even the pot at the end of the rainbow, which conservatives know does not really exist, would not be big enough to make a dent in the debt that we already owe. So, eventually somebody must pay. Look at your offspring and ask if this is really what you intended for them? Which of them will be asked to take the largest share of the burden? Many will just give up and move home.

Both taxation and spending reform are very necessary for our country to continue to provide jobs for our people. However, the recent tax increase at the beginning of 2013 that whacked the most productive members of our society is not the answer. All rational economists understand that no country can tax its way out of a recession or a depression.
This is the age of cliffs and crises for sure. Since the Democrat-controlled Senate has not passed a budget in four years, after sequestration, and before the May 18 debt ceiling date, we have yet another huge cliff to get by. If the Congress had passed a real budget, this would be one less cliff to answer.
Instead, in one month from today, the government will shut down unless two factions—Republicans and Democrats—come to an agreement to reauthorize the funding for the government. With no budget, they use this reauthorization mechanism known as a continuing resolution. The current resolution expires on March 26. Look for lots of weeping and gnashing of teeth over this one. Obama will surely concoct a reason why it is Republicans fault, hoping to convince Americans to give him an all-Democrat House in 2014. Will Americans buy his lies yet again and give him the dictatorship he desires?
All of these crises are contrived by Obama to keep our eyes off the real issues—the economy and the lack of jobs. He is a great manipulator of the truth. A historian in the future will easily notice that Obama regularly has hurt the economy by punishing business, rather than trying to aid a recovery. By having a crisis every month, nobody has the time to be asking the president about the economy. The crises are not coincidental.

By adding excessive and costly regulations to the few industries in America that have been making it on their own; it will only encourage them to contract and to consider leaving our shores. Logically, this will provide fewer jobs when we need more. Either Obama is stupid and does not know this or he is very smart and finds a limping US economy to his liking. It helps to remember that Obama does not like businesses.
I fear that the low information voters will forgive our president even while their families are starving. They will continue to wish that Obama be permitted to serve a third or fourth term, because he is the only one who might make life better for them.
The Obama love affair with low information voters reminds me of the stories of when Joseph Stalin died. The prisoners in the Russian gulags (Stalin had put them there.) cried real tears proclaiming “Who will help us now that Joseph is dead?” Just like Stalin had a huge following among those he was in the process of killing, the low information voters simply cannot accept that the nation’s major folk hero is America’s Stalin. They get a lot of rhetoric from the prince of prevarication, while he is taking away freedoms one regulation at a time.
Excessive taxes and huge amounts of spending will come back to bite US this year and for years to come. There will be fewer jobs each and every year. Eventually not only will America go broke, it will break, and all Americans may well wish to be in the gulags. At least the prisoners eat. At least for now they do!

Obama is convinced that Americans are so dumb that he will never be blamed for anything. When he says the Republicans did it, he expects that low information voters (LIV) will intensify their dislike for the GOP. Unfortunately, he is right. Nobody expects a president to be a liar and so now that we have one who lies habitually, the president can dominate everything unless Americans choose to wake up.
Rather than do what he had to do to keep debt off the backs of our children, President Obama did what all poor leaders do to solve the big issues affecting his administration. He formed a special debt commission.
This is not to be confused with the super committee appointed to avoid sequestration. The debt commission actually preceded the super committee. For this commission, just as the others, Obama had no intentions of solving the spending problem.
After adding $6 trillion in debt in just over four years in office, the president has no inclination to stop spending—even if the nation goes bankrupt. In his second term, in fact, he does not even pay lip service to the debt. It simply does not matter to Obama. We can see it in how he resists reducing spending in any meaningful way.
His objective is to continue to spend and spend and spend, unconstrained. He wants to tie in his spending to the benefits realized by low information voters. Their loyalty is very important to 2014. If the president is forced to stop spending by those nasty Republicans, he wants Americans to believe that everybody will be hurting except the party of the rich.

That is how the new Obama thinks. And he is getting away with it by blaming the GOP while he is dismantling America. Convincing low information voters that spending is the solution, not the problem, appears to be working out well for the president’s personal legacy.
When Obama formed his debt commission, the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” a.k.a. the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010, he at least appeared to care about the debt. The commission’s job was to solve the fiscal problem (debt) for Obama without his direct involvement.
Obama however, miscalculated the fervor of the commission to their appointed task. The members thought the study was for real. They were not informed by White House personnel that Obama had gotten buyer’s remorse on a real solution and that from day one of the commission, he was rooting for them to fail and simply go away.
The president hoped that a “no-report, no-conclusion” commission, such as the super-committee would be the final result. Though the commission was another one of those times that Obama planned to fake right and go left, they actually did a fine job for the American people. The president breathed a sigh of relief when, as good as it was, the work did not get a strong enough vote to be acted upon by the Congress.
The bad news for the president is that the members of Simpson-Bowles did not let ideology stop them from rendering a fair recommendation. They actually did a great job, though few thought they could conclude so well.

Today, many continue to see that the commission’s work was excellent, other than its one major flaw. They accepted Obamacare as fait accompli. Unfortunately, our president chose to completely ignore the recommendations of the very commission that he had formed. The corrupt media stayed silent after Obama rejected this fine piece of work from America’s best.
Nothing in life is perfect!
There are things I would have liked to have seen that were not in the report. For example, the debt commission should have reduced the annual deficit to zero. Right now our national debt is over 100% of GDP. Though the debt reduction in Simpson Bowles was substantial, it was not enough to begin paying the debt down to much safer levels. Few thinking Americans can see a justification for our nation to be stealing from its future?
The president has been enjoying almost unlimited spending power from the day of his inauguration with what he perceives to be a limitless credit card. He was and still is not ready for any commission or anybody to tell him to slow the spending. The commission offered constraints to Obama in the area of spending power and the president did not accept any of them. If he liked the recommendations, he would have adopted them.
As designed by Obama, the commission was supposed to fail and it failed. Consequently, their recommended debt reduction as proposed never reached Congress. Thus, it never could be introduced into the president’s budget.

What a setup for a number of great Americans on the commission, who conceived of a fine solution, who spent their personal capital to put it forth, who knew it would work, and then found it rejected by the administration because it actually would have worked.
After hearing and ignoring the debt commission report completely, in the very next budget cycle, the president proposed nearly $1.5 trillion in additional deficit spending for the 2011 budget. There was no attempt to cut spending. There was no attempt to factor in the great work of the Obama chartered Simpson-Bowles Commission.
President Obama is tough to shame. After the Republicans were able to force the Democrat-controlled Senate in May 2011 to bring Obama’s budget up for a vote, it failed unanimously, 0-97. Not a single vote. Obama did not flinch. He ignored the results and just kept on spending from the authorization of the next continuing resolution.
As long as low information voters provide Obama guaranteed keys to the kingdom, there will be no solution on the debt, the deficit, or the fiscal cliff du jour. One day there will be a sudden crash. Obama and his clever advisors, continue to count on low information voters remaining ignorant while they conduct their tyranny.
The commission’s report came out in December 2010. It was properly titled “The Moment of Truth.” It unapologetically stressed that the United States is on an unsustainable fiscal path. President Obama either does not buy that or he buys the message of calamity for our nation, and it pleases him.

The preamble to this report is excellent in content, and it is poetic in form. It says what we need to know. Americans can read it and understand that continuing to spend borrowed money is about to sink our country. Obama read the report and chose to hasten our demise with huge spending.
It gave me some hope to read the preamble to this great work as it is not often that I find the work of any government body, appointed or elected, either logical, truthful or thorough.
This preamble is compelling. I exhort my fellow Americans to ignore this at your own peril. Here it is:
Throughout our nation’s history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows we face a moment of truth once again. We cannot play games or put off hard choices any longer. Without regard to party, we have a patriotic duty to keep the promise of America to give our children and grandchildren a better life. Our challenge is clear and inescapable: America cannot be great if we go broke. Our businesses will not be able to grow and create jobs, and our workers will not be able to compete successfully for the jobs of the future without a plan to get this crushing debt burden off our backs. The American people are counting on us to put politics aside, pull together not pull apart, and agree on a plan to live within our means and make America strong for the long haul. 


Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan chastised President Barack Obama for his off-hand rejection of the commission’s powerful deficit-reduction proposal: “The worst mistake the President made was not embracing that vehicle right away.” Greenspan made these remarks at the Bloomberg Washington Summit, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
As of this writing, the report is the best effort at solving the taxing, spending, deficit and debt issues in recent years. It is such a well done study that it continues to be referenced as part of most conversations on tax reform engaged in honestly on the left and the right. Why is it that our leaders refuse to take the actions necessary to make America strong again? They do know what must be done, but they are afraid if they do the right thing, and somebody has as little as one bread stick less, you and I will never elect them again. Isn’t it time to relieve representatives who think like that of their sworn duties—post haste?
The children running our government—the Congress and the president—are dysfunctional. When one House of Congress advocates capitalism, and the other socialism, there really is no middle ground. It is up to the people to begin to pay attention. Ultimately because we make the choices, we get the government we deserve. When we wake up, and we begin to act on behalf of America, let’s all pray that it is not too late.