Congress will be voting on bailing out state governments.
State governments who overspent, recklessly did not plan for future economic downturns, and are entwined with special interest groups like public sector unions, are turning to the federal government for a bailout.
So we have state governments who are running deficits turning to the federal government that is running a 13 trillion dollar debt.
In this Washington Times article, Joe Sestak (running for the Pennsylvanian senate seat this fall) released this statement about the bailout and his opponent:
"Congressman Toomey's out-of-touch philosophy was on display again yesterday when he publicly opposed deficit-neutral aid to states that would prevent massive layoffs and cuts to essential service." (Emphasis added.)Essential services? Is this not to imply there are non-essential services funded by tax payers? Would Representative Sestak care to comment on the non-essential spending of state governments? The federal government?
As Ludwig von Mises reminds us in Liberalism, The Classical Tradition
(click here for Book Reports), big government anti-capitalism "is a policy of capital consumption. It recommends that the present be more abundantly provided for at the expense of the future." Both the federal government and many state governments have overspent themselves at the cost of future tax payers, and now they are colluding to compound the mess. Mises was the only economist to predict the Great Depression, but one must wonder if even he could have predicted the mess we're creating with bailouts.
Fiscal restraint and responsibility are issues most Americans can come together on. The fairer the tax code can be made so that more people are sharing the tax burden, the more people will be opposed to irresponsible deficit spending. Otherwise, we'll continue to be a nation of tax payers and tax consumers, one side being leveraged against the other by those spendthrift politicians.
