We need to "pay for" those trillions in emergency coronavirus spending by cutting government down to size, not by sucking vitally-needed money out of the private sector with taxes. It will be more important than ever to reduce the burden of government we carry on our backs.
It's long past time for the political class to share the pain, and the coronavirus sharply illustrated the dangers of having a blind, bloated central government that is too flabby to respond quickly when needed. The alarm bells rang but Uncle Sam was too fat to get off the couch.
There are indulgences the political class will have to learn to do without as we deal with the enormous load of debt we're adding to the titanic load of debt we already accumulated. Their perks and pleasures will need to be cut back. The endless boom in the capital must end.
Agency heads and statist politicians cannot be trusted to handle the cuts we need. You know what they'll do: cut the muscle to protect the fat. They'll send the first pink slips to the doctors, police, firefighters, teachers, scientists, etc. and protect the bureaucrats.
We were foolish to put so much money and power in the hands of people whose first instinct is to use every nickel they get to obtain more money and power, who mastered the art of making us suffer every time we try to claw back a dollar. It's time to begin correcting that mistake.
It's necessary because we can clearly see the dismal effect of OVERFUNDING government. Beltway mythology claims you can only address a problem by throwing more money at government agencies. The amount of funding you give them is the only measure of how much you "care."
The truth has been laid bare by this crisis, and should have been obvious all along: beyond a certain point, increased funding to government agencies is COUNTERPRODUCTIVE. It interferes with their ability to focus on their core mission. They pack on too much bureaucratic flab.
The traditional Beltway model of perpetual spending increases is like a bodybuilder assuming he'll get twice as muscular if he eats twice as much and sitting down to a giant plate of burgers and fries. We need lean, fit government - more focused, more effective, less expensive.
We also have to break our addiction to deficit spending. We needed to do it a long time ago, but this crisis will bring fiscal doomsday years closer. The amount of money we waste on financing national debt is OBSCENE. Sure would be nice to have that dough for emergencies, huh?
We also need to reduce our debt load to reduce our dependency on foreign money for debt financing. There are options that won't be on the table until we're less dependent on cadging money from sinister regimes that definitely do not have our best interests at heart.
Bloated, indebted government is also a corruption of our information resources, whose value we should be learning from the coronavirus crisis. Deficit-fueled, big-spending government is a lie. It's false data pumped into our economic processing system, producing false results.
This will become obvious enough on the day people can't get their "free" benefits and the payouts they're "entitled" to because there is no money to pay for them, but hopefully we can learn the lesson and make big changes before the system crashes completely.
After the worst of the coronavirus passes, it will become more clear than ever that America needs more jobs, more workers generating both value and revenue, more freedom to act quickly in response to both danger and opportunity, higher-quality information to make decisions.
We need millions of sharp private sector eyes and ready hands from coast to coast, not a fat, blind leviathan curled up in D.C. demanding ever more of our skin and bones to feed its strange appetites. Don't let it use this crisis to get BIGGER, and make us all smaller. /end
