The T-Word

Mark Steyn delves into ancient history:

Here’s a newspaper headline from a yellowing cutting I found up in the attic:

U.S. Budget Deficit Hits Record $438 Billion For Year

Boy, those were the days! Flappers in rumble seats, wind-up victrolas, and deficits you could measure in billions. A more innocent age, lost in the mists of time. Gosh, you’d have to be pushing, oh, 12 even to remember it.

That was a headline from 2008, the first year after Democrats took control of Congress. Mark continues:

$438 billion was the record-breaking federal deficit in 2008. That’s all of three years ago. In 2011, it’s getting on for four times as big. …

Obama did that. The Democrats did that. “Trillion” is their word. They mainstreamed it, and very effectively, in nothing flat. But it’s not a fact of life. It’s a fact of their life, and they should be on the defensive about it. What do we have to show for the trillionization of government? The dead-parrot economy, the underwater property market, the flatline jobs market. But lots more bureaucracy and regulation.

Obama wants to demonize “millionaires”? Who’s he kidding? He and Harry Reid and Barney Frank are the first trillionaire politicians in American history, and they want us to accept that as the new baseline.

We will know we are making progress when the average American voter knows the difference between a billion and a trillion.

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