The Path to a Banana Republic

Ever since Sen. Judd Gregg turned down Obama's cabinet post he's been a thorn in the side of the administration. He was chosen for Commerce Secretary because of his expertise in economic matters, and now that expertise is causing him to sound an alarm about the country's future:

A leading fiscal mind on Capitol Hill and a one-time Obama Cabinet pick sounded the alarm Sunday over the projected long-term financial challenges the country faces.

“This deficit is driven by us,” New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg candidly said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union when asked about the federal government’s projected $1.42 trillion operating deficit for the 2009 fiscal year.

“You talk about systemic risk. The systemic risk today is the Congress of the United States,“ the Ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, “that we’re creating these massive debts which we’re passing on to our children. We’re going to undermine fundamentally the quality of life for our children by doing this.”

“Now you can’t blame that on [former President] George [W.] Bush,” Greg said, noting that using the Obama administration’s projections the budget deficit for the next ten years is $1 trillion per year. And Gregg said that during the same ten-year period, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product would increase from 40 percent — which Gregg called “tolerable but still too high” — up to 80 percent.

The figures, Gregg told King, “mean we’re basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country. And you just can’t do that. You can’t keep running these [federal] programs out [into the future] and not paying for them. And you can’t keep throwing debt on top of debt.”

“Standards of living will drop if we keep this up,” Gregg also said.

Of course, if lower standards of living is a goal of the administration, and I think it is, nobody in the White House will care what Gregg says. In the eyes of the radical left we've been guilty of being too rich and too successful for too many years. It's time we were put in our place and the massive deficit spending will more than accomplish that.