The Republican Party is the shame of the Western world.  Not only have they nominated Donald Trump to be their candidate for President, but they have jettisoned any claim they had to the mantle of fiscal conservatism.

America is somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 trillion in debt.  That’s $43,000 per man, woman, and child in the United States.  We can’t simply grow our way out of such a hole.  There has to be a coherent idea promulgated by a respected political party that will champion a program to help us recover from this nightmare.  The nightmare, of course, is the likelihood that at some point in the future, one of America’s bondholders (such as China) will be pinched for cash, necessitating a call on some of the money we’ve been using to prop up our drunken spree.  When this happens, we will have to quickly come up with the money — which will be politically impossible.  If we do, we’ll be broke, and that won’t bode well for the world economy.  If we don’t, we’ll have the same result.

Only an insane person or a fool would believe that we can continue like this indefinitely.  But the GOP, once the standard-bearer of fiscal rectitude, has, over the years, abandoned any pretense to this lofty crown.  Indeed, post-1945 governance reveals the Democrats to be better stewards of the economy than the Republicans.  Compare the spending and taxing habits of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes to the Democrats who preceded them: you’ll find that the only resemblance they have to a Yankee tightwad is purely rhetorical.  Now, it is nobody’s battle.  America, once again, has been side-tracked by nonsense.  And this year, we’re borrowing many billions every month just to keep what we have, such as the big military machine that never knows peace.  We dance to any tune that drowns out the cacophonous noise of reality.  Wait until we have to pay the piper.