Why Not Just Put the Entire Federal Budget on Credit?

The sequester is far too devastating for America to bear. Already the White House has had to stop giving tours, and who knows how it will escalate from there? Maybe next they’ll cancel the Easter Egg Roll, or close the mineral exhibit at the Smithsonian. Or reduce operating hours at the Washington Monument bookstore. Soon there will be nothing left to do in D.C. but go to the visitors’ gallery at the Capitol building and shout at the politicians down below.

A mere $85 billion cut has caused all this agony, yet the federal deficit has been over $1 trillion for each of the past four years. Maybe it’s time to admit we’ll never stop running huge deficits. The majority of our spending comes from entitlements, and we can’t cut those because people are, by definition, “entitled” to them. That means it doesn’t matter what math and reason say, we have to continue to pay for them. Thus an increased national debt each year is inevitable. But so what?

Think about it: We’re past $16 trillion in debt so far, and we’re just fine. We have a pretty good scheme going to keep up the level of government we want: We take big loans from our children and then die before paying them back. And we have no reason to stop. What’s the worst that has happened so far? America’s credit was downgraded. And that hurt us how? It’s not like people are going to stop giving the federal government loans — it has nukes. Plus, the president has asserted that he can take out anyone he wants with drone strikes whenever he feels like it (“Want to know who’s on my secret kill list? I’ll give you a hint: No one who loans us money.”). So that brings us to the obvious question: Why not just put the entire federal budget on credit?

Are we just being suckers paying taxes? The point of taxes is that someone needs to pay our government’s bills, but considering the amount of debt we’ve run up with no problem, maybe that’s not true. It seems unfair that the politicians see no reason to cut spending, but we have to keep paying taxes like the federal deficit actually means something. So why not give our economy a big stimulus and just put all government operations on credit? The debt ceiling will now just be whatever numbers we actually have words for.

This should receive huge bipartisan support. Republicans don’t like taxes, Democrats don’t like spending cuts — so now we’ll have no taxes and no cuts. The only thing we’ll have is even more debt, and we can all just agree to stop pretending we care about that. How can it hurt us, anyway? Dollars are just made-up things. They used to represent gold we had in a vault somewhere or something, but now they’re just completely pretend numbers on a computer. Saying we owe 16 trillion dollars is like saying we owe 16 trillion unicorn farts. How will this “debt” ever harm us?

So let’s continue onward without fear and with a lot more money in our pockets. We’ll have generous entitlements that are completely tax-free, and the only problem will be some growing number no one really pays attention to. What could possibly happen? I guess some sort of complete economic collapse that takes the government and all of its entitlements down with it. But with the path we’ve taken for years, haven’t we already been betting that will never actually happen? So let’s finally open our arms really wide and embrace our massive debt, swiping the big government credit card to pay all our bills. We can celebrate by adding free roller coaster rides to the newly reopened White House tours.