Country In Financial Mess And We’re Fooling With What?

By: Tim Timmons

“Freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”

-George Orwell

It seems that everyone gets, what’s the new term, butt-hurt over everything these days.

No idea what happened to the lessons we learned at age 5 – sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. Someone gets called a name now and the world comes to a screeching halt.

Why would anyone want to hand that kind of power over their lives to someone who’s insulting them? I get it when we’re tykes on the playground. But as adults? C’mon, aren’t we old enough to know that there are just some plain idiots in the world and nothing is ever going to change that?

Sigh.

I get it. It’s a losing battle. The world is what it is. People name call all the time now and people get offended all the time now. The ones who get me the most though are the politicians.

Didn’t they know when they ran for office what they were getting into? Let’s take the current mess in Washington. At the time of this writing, the argument rages over whether or not the federal government will shut down. Democrats are blaming Republicans and Republicans are . . . oh heck you know the rest. They’re all pointing fingers and calling names.

In the meantime, the federal debt topped $33 trillion for the first time.

That’s 33 trillion, as in 3-3 with 12 zeroes after it.

$33,000,000,000,000.

And these clowns in Washington are trying to tell you and me that they have to run up the debt even more.

Think about that for a second.

Any reasonable person could find millions, no, scratch that . . . billions . . . uh, wait a minute . . . I’ll bet most folks could find a trillion or three to cut from government spending. And I’ll bet it wouldn’t be that hard.

But the facts are that the Democrats and the Republicans aren’t talking about cutting. They are talking about slowing the rate of spending a little.

Slowing spending.

SLOWING! SPENDING!

Instead of finding ways to fix the problem, their brilliant solution is to let the problem continue to grow, only more slowly.

And we are going along with it.

In the meantime, what’s dominating the politicians’ time? Oh, the Democrats are frothing at the mouth to find ways to send Trump to prison and the Republicans are frothing on their own at the idea of impeaching Biden – something that will never happen because the Democrats control the senate.

Frankly, why should we care what Trump or Biden do? Wouldn’t we be better off spending our time looking for answers to out-of-control national spending? If this were a forest fire, it would be engulfing more than half the continent with zero percent contained.

Maybe we should stop listening to polls (after all, when have they been correct?) and start looking for someone who might really throw politics to the wind and restore some fiscal sanity to Washington and the country.

Winter’s coming. It’s going to get awfully cold, especially if we can’t afford to feed the furnace.

-Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically on Wednesdays in The Paper. Timmons is the publisher of The Paper and can be contacted at [email protected].