There's an old story about Josef Stalin (who was extremely brutal), Nikita Khrushchev (who was merely very brutal), and Leonid Brezhnev (who was a corrupt pretender) that is instructive in the tale of our national debt. One day Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev were in a limousine that suddenly stopped. The driver told them that the engine wasn't working. So Stalin had the driver shot and got someone to fix the car.
Then the limousine stopped a second time, and again they were told that it was broken. Khrushchev had the driver sent to a labor camp and got someone else to fix and drive the car.
The limo stopped a third time, and do you know what Brezhnev did? He closed the curtains and pretended the car was still moving.
Brezhnev's approach in a nutshell perfectly characterizes Obama's approach to the national debt. For 150 days, the debt, as reported by the federal government, has not increased by one penny.
The portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress closed Monday, August 10, at $18,112,975,000,000, according to the latest Daily Treasury Statement, which was published at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday.
That, according to the Treasury's statements, makes 150 straight days the debt subject to the limit has been frozen at $18,112,975,000,000.
$18,112,975,000,000 is about $25 million below the current legal debt limit of $18,113,000,080,959.35.
On July 30, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew sent a letter to the leaders of Congress informing them that he was extending a “debt issuance suspension period” through October 30.
In practice, that means that unless Congress enacts new legislation to increase the limit on the federal debt before then, the Treasury will continue for at least the next eleven weeks to issue Daily Treasury Statements that show the federal debt subject to the limit beginning and ending each day frozen just below that limit.
In other words, if Congress won't lift the debt limit, Obama will keep spending anyway and report phony numbers. In essence, Congress's right and responsibility to lift the debt ceiling has been taken away from Obama. And do you know how many Republicans in Congress are complaining about this? Zero.
I have argued in past columns that congressmen have violated their oath of office by giving up legislative powers they have sworn to protect to Obama. Republicans don't say a word either because they are afraid of Obama, or they agree with this level of spending. I suspect some of the former but more of the latter.
And that is the most troubling part. A person can jump off a building and close his eyes and tell himself he is not falling. For a time, it will work. But eventually, it will be a fact that can no longer be denied. There are laws of physics that we are aware of, but there are also laws of economics. You cannot forever spend money you do not have. Eventually there will be a collapse.
In the meantime, Obama commits fraud, openly and brazenly – the kind of fraud that would send a CFO of a publicly traded company to jail. Imagine if the CFO of Google did this, purposely lying about financial statements. There would be calls for criminal investigations, stockholder suits, and more. When Obama does it in a way that affects everyone in the country, it's barely reported, and there is never any criticism of our 18-hole president.
