Too Big to Fail

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Our government in Washington has made $88.6 trillion in promises it cannot afford to keep. By some reliable estimates, the national debt will become unsustainable by 2037. Social Security expenditures are beginning to exceed payroll tax revenues. Medicare has been in this condition since 2008. The annual federal budget deficit is almost as large the early Clinton-era federal budget. Some state governments are, pace the columnist E.J. Dionne, literally bankrupt.


How then do our leaders respond? With "austerity" measures that barely cut any spending and add trillions to the debt. Others assert that the shortfalls are simply the consequence of the recession. Ergo, we should spend our way out of the recession. Consider it borrowing our way out of debt. But the biggest problem is not the political class's innumeracy. It's their lack of restraint. Presented with a problem, they are seized with the uncontrollable urge to "Do Something," without knowing how that something will be paid for, whether it will work, or what the consequences will be.
Are there older Americans who must board buses to Canada in order to fill their prescriptions? Then we must pass a Medicare prescription drug benefit, even if it is not paid for and boosts the original entitlement's already staggering unfunded liabilities to the tune of trillions. Are there people out of work?

We must have a stimulus program, even if it is not paid for and there is debate over whether it could even work at a conceptual level.
Sometimes, the beneficiaries of federal benevolence need not even be American voters. In response to the humanitarian crisis being inflicted on Libya by its undeniably brutal dictator, Washington interventionists cry out for a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone over the country. This despite the fact that there is no consensus the no-fly zone will work, no real plan for what we would do if it failed, no idea of who would be empowered in the event of its success, and no clear constitutional mandate to be behaving as a world government in embryo.

[Evad]

Zero Based Budgeting will cure the problem.

Nothing else.