Mitch Daniels: Debt disaster denialists think America has a new magic bullet
Mitch Daniels is a former Governor of Indiana and former President of Purdue University. He is also a Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He recently wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post, an excerpt of which is below.
For years, I kept a favorite cartoon in my desk and pulled it out to open the annual business-plan meeting at the unit I led. It showed a frazzled executive standing in front of a screen displaying his multiyear sales projections. The line ran straight horizontally, close and parallel to the x-axis, almost to the right edge, where it leaped steeply upward, next to a label that said, “Miracle happens here!”
No impulse is more human than wishfulness, the tendency to grasp at any straw that enables us to avert our eyes from difficult realities and put off facing them. Members of America’s national political class personify this failing, in their continuing practice of fiscal denialism. Even as the inexorable arithmetic piles up, those responsible for the nation’s economic future and national security fasten on imaginary miracles to justify a gross default of their duty of stewardship.
Read the entire piece here.
Published works by members or staff of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget do not necessarily reflect the views of all members or staff of the Committee.
