Nancy Pelosi and Morality? Really!

Just when you think it might be a tough day to find a topic to discuss, Nancy Pelosi rides to the rescue again. Ms. Pelosi has been a treasure of insanity, quotes, and madness over time and has provided fodder for many a post to this blog. Remember how she screamed that over 500 million Americans were losing their jobs every week even though there are barely 300 million people in the country? Remember how she explained we would not know what was in the health care reform legislation until the legislation got passed? Remember her voodoo economic lesson she gave us by proclaiming that unemployment benefit checks were one of the very best ways to create jobs, leaving one to ponder the extension of her logic: does this mean that the more unemployed people we have, the more jobs will be created? Priceless.

Today she has graced us with another Pelosiism that further illustrates how out of touch with reality she can be. Regarding the urgent need to get Federal government under control, Ms. Pelosi recently dropped this gem on the world: "I think this debate is on a higher ground of our values. It's not about money. It's about the morality of what we're doing." Thus, it appears that we should not make any cuts in the bloated federal government on morality grounds, not sensible budgeting and economic grounds. Ridiculous.

Any number of things wrong with Pelosi talking about morality. First of all, morality is a very personal, private sense of being. For her to dictate what is moral and what is not moral is an insult to free thought and overall freedom. If she wants to go down that road, then many Americans would reply that any political party that condones adultery and lying has no grounds to lecture any citizen about morality. Democrats John Edwards, Jim MacGreevey, Eliot Spitzer, and Bill Clinton were serious adulterers and liars.

Is breaking the law immoral? Many, many Democratic politicians in Illinois have served prison time for bribery, fraud, and other crimes. Democratic Congressman William J. Jefferson was convicted of bribery with the added twist of storing his bribery money in his freezer. Please, Ms. Pelosi, your peers and your party are in no position to lecture any American about morality.

Second, how moral would the decision to cut wasteful government spending in the following areas:

• Is it "moral" to waste billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to station tens of thousands of U.S. troops around the world in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and throughout Europe, defending us against threats that no longer exist or that can be better handled by local, friendly countries?
• Is it "moral" to waste billions and billions of taxpayer dollars on politicians' earmarks that are nothing more than thinly disguised ways for incumbent politicians to fund their re-election campaigns?
• Is it "moral" to waste billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to support the marketing activities of large corporations via the government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Market Access Program, and other corporate welfare programs, shouldn't these marketing expenses be part of each corporation's marketing expense stream?
• Is it "moral" to not sell at least some of the 55,000 Federal government buildings that are currently vacant in order to reduce reduce taxpayer expenses and generate revenue via the sales of these buildings to reduce the deficit?
• Is it "moral" to not cancel the production of the V-22 Osprey aircraft and save billions of taxpayer dollars, an aircraft that has seen vast cost overruns and poor performance results and which much of the military does not want or need?
• Is it "moral" to not replace the highly expensive but poorly performing Space Tracking Surveillance System with lower cost and better performing alternatives (according to a Defense Department analysis, the users of the systems)?
• Is it "moral" to waste billions of taxpayer dollars by allowing the Army, Navy, and Air Force to continue ordering obsolete parts and supplies that are never used?

(Note: many of these wasteful examples of government spending come from a joint analysis and paper done by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the National Taxpayers Union. However, other reputable and educated American organizations such as the Cato Institute, the Concord Coalition, and Obama's own deficit reduction commission have also done thoughtful, thorough, and insightful analysis on ways to get government spending under control that are also "moral.")

You get the idea. By not knowing how to trim and budget of fat and excess or not wanting to trim the budget, Ms. Pelosi just lumps every government expense into this nebulous "moral" bucket that should not be touched because she and only she knows what is moral and what is not. A budget by definition is numbers. You can debate the impact reducing some of those numbers might have but a budget is numbers. Unfortunately, the Federal government's numbers are not good and need to be drastically reduced.

If Ms. Pelosi wants to talk morality, let me counter argue that the biggest atrocity to morality would be if this generation of America citizens and American politicians burden future generations of Americans with mountains of debt to pay off but who garnered none of the benefits of spending the money that caused the debt. That is the biggest moral tragedy of our time if we fail, not whether or not Pelosi thinks not cutting the bloated government is the moral thing to do.

It amazes me that she and others can continue to think that we are not in crisis/meltdown mode when the Federal deficit in February alone was over $200 billion. Not total spending, just the spending of the government that was done beyond what revenues were received. If we use $200 billion as a conservative estimate of the February deficit, then everyday Pelosi and her kind spent over $7 billion a day that they did not have cash for. Every hour they spent almost $300 million that they did not have.

Unbelievable numbers. This kind of reckless spending is immoral. It will wreck our economy and our freedom for decades to come. But we should not be surprised. The latest Obama budget has virtually no budget cuts despite the dismal February results. Obama totally ignored his own deficit reduction commission's recommendations.

And not to be outdone, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently and erroneously stated that Social Security will be solvent for decades to come, a most insane statement that Ms. Pelosi cannot even match for unbridled ignorance. Currently, the Social Security Administration is paying tens of billions of dollars more than it collects. The Social Security Trust fund has been depleted by politicians over time for other uses, there is no trust fund of money sitting around the U.S. Treasury. The unfunded liabilities of Social Security is well into the TRILLIONS of dollars. And Harry thinks it is solvent for decades. That is the most immoral, misleading statement that any politician can make.

Thus, we have the triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid who either see no problem, cannot solve the problem, or choose not to solve the problem. In any case, they do not have the high moral ground and future generations of Americans will see them for what they are: morally corrupt and inept.



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