The last time I touched on the national debt, we were only a mere $18.4 trillion in the hole. Last week, we passed $22 trillion.
It’s a staggering number, but so is our inability to come together to solve the nation’s many pressing problems causing the debt.
Recently, both parties agreed they wanted to address immigration. First, they failed to reach an agreement before the deadline resulting in a costly shutdown for a month. When that failed to produce movement, the government was reopened for three weeks to get both sides talking again, only to come back and still fail to reach an agreement that satisfied both parties.
Instead of serious compromise, the end result will tie up the nation for years as the two sides take their feud to the courts — costing more than the president required, as did the shutdown — while the national debt continues to grow with annual interest alone expected to exceed a trillion dollars.
Congress is dysfunctionally broken, and it’s clear the next two years will focus on little more than insults, investigations, stonewalling and campaign positioning as the members are already vying for the 2020 election season with more promised government handouts.
We are both broke financially and structurally with neither side willing to recognize that the left nor the right can govern independent of the other.
Our founding fathers made sure that the only way our government works is when we work together.
Gridlock only produces more gridlock, and sadly the folks we continue to send to Washington have no appetite for seeking solutions that work to the benefit of the country as a whole. Most are so embroiled in partisan politics they only represent slightly more than a majority while leaving the balance of their constituents unrepresented.
Until we wise up and send centrist candidates to Washington who acknowledge that neither the far right nor far left agendas will achieve supermajority support, we are doomed to watch the same mess grow worse election by election.
A united household can’t function this way, nor can a business or government.
Eventually, our credit will run out. The left and the right will desperately need the other side just to get by, and by then, we will have ruined our children’s and grandchildren’s futures while putting the nation at great peril.
This country was built by strong-willed pioneers who worked hard, fought and died to give us a nation where the pursuit of freedom and opportunity was the primary goal.
There is still time to turn things around, but the prospect is getting smaller with every election.
