There are many different ways to look at the “crisis,” but the real problem boils down to this: the government continues to spend money it does not have, continues to keep passing legislation or promising to support programs that cost money – yet it seldom stops or even seriously reduces those current programs to got us $20 trillion in debt in the first place; but there never seems to be a problem with spending more.
And the Trump administration wants to spend on a border wall, and on the military; and the Democrats want to spend on Obamacare; and it seems every member of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, have a favorite project to promote. Almost nothing ever gets cut. Even when the administration threatens to withhold federal funds from self-proclaimed “sanctuary cities,” it is being done as a punishment, not because we can’t afford to spend the money.
We wish that the government would more prudently guard the public purse, and realize that the money for all those programs has to come from somewhere. If they can't find it by reducing present programs, maybe it shouldn't be spent at all!
Government measures a program not by how much it accomplishes, but by how much it spends. And of course, the sympathy always is for the beneficiaries, not for those who pay for them. Everyone decries the level of spending, but they tend to avoid taking steps to reduce it.
Politicians seem to think they can prove their importance by the number of dollars (or millions of dollars) they spend. And anyone who doesn’t want to spend is called “selfish” or “greedy.” No, it is not easy to cut programs back, and it is too easy to enlarge them or to start new ones. As long as we think problems can be solved by throwing money at them, the national debt will persist.