Preach, Brother.

Over at Ace of Spades, they've been preaching Jeremiads on the DOOMED Debt cycle for some time. It has of late crossed into the mainstream. In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson tells it like it is:

We in America have created suicidal government; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean that government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.

When the end comes, we will lose things that we like. We will lose benefits we have come to depend on, tax breaks that we treat as our due. The fact that we were fools for ever trusting Caeser in the first place will not make it hurt the less.

Read the whole thing.