Render Unto Caesar

This coming Sunday is Easter, surely the most important day of the year for Christians around the world for without the events that it celebrates, there is no Christianity. Relatively few, especially in this country, will concern themselves with things spiritual but will concentrate instead on temporal fripperies such as chocolate eggs and baby rabbits, which, a week or two from now will find themselves discarded to find their own way to survive.

Something else though happens this coming Sunday morning unless my first grade arithmetic has deserted me.

This country runs out of money or, perhaps more accurately, it runs out of credit.

Early last Tuesday morning I resisted the temptation to take a smart person to task. He contended that we must, as a nation, attend to the debt limit. I said that we must attend to the debt. Well that too he agreed but we must increase the debt limit first.

I was in someone else’s house, it was the owner’s son who proposed this “bassackward” approach to economic reality, and so I kept my peace. But how I wanted to propose this scenario ……………

Let's say a guy has a good job and has a delightful wife and a couple of kids. Through his bank and his credit union he has a line of credit worth a million dollars while on the other side of the ledger, he owes $500,000 in mortgage, car loans etc.

One day, the delightful wife and he decide that they should rearrange things so that they can retire some of their debt and so they sell one of their cars and cut out a planned expenditure on a camper. Because of these efforts, they reduce their debt by $50,000.

Where then is the justification or the need to go to their bank and apply for an increase in their credit line?

Where then is the justification for the US to go to our bankers around the world if we are serious about reducing our deficit?

The answer is that the Democrats are not. Why else would Obama announce his budget with GOP leaders in the front row including Paul Ryan and castigate them as ideologues? Well, the answer is that Obama’s resume tells you who and what he is which is more than you can say about his birth certificate wherever that is.

He is a Chicago community activist, which is Midway liberal-speak for a street thug.

Not that he’s necessarily the enforcer in person. After all, Capone didn't always wield the baseball bat himself. Sometimes he sent a czar or, in the case of Standard and Poor’s, Obama sent Timmy Geithner. You remember him? He is the "genius' we couldn't manage without but yet this "wunderkind" found Turbo Tax too complicated and is now the Treasury Secretary.

For once, in a very long time, this White House was rattled when that reporting agency proposed to downgrade their assessment of US bonds to a negative. The White House huffed and puffed but S&P, to their credit, did not budge. Nor should they because their credibility is on the line with governments and corporations around the world.

So why would a highly intelligent and well educated man such as the straw-man I cited hold the views he does? Why would he discount the Tea Party as “weirdoes” and “sickoes”?

He’s a liberal. He’s a lifelong Democrat. He depends on his union. And, he’s scared. And so he should be but the remedy he seeks will not be found where he's looking.