Who Cares, right?

In case you happened to miss it, during the dead of night, our courageous Congress just rushed through a new spending plan that adds a trillion more dollars to the National Debt. In the process, the happy spenders in both parties finally rid themselves of the accursed sequestration limitations that they themselves had imposed to force discipline on themselves, since they were rightly convinced that neither party could be trusted to stop piling on to the debt without it. Now, everyone is happy. The Republicans get more military spending, the Democrats get more welfare spending, and the American people get another trillion of debt piled on their backs. Everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except Senator Rand Paul, the reluctant Presidential candidate from the State of Kentucky. Last night he took to the floor of the Senate to give the shortest filibuster speech in history, a twenty minute stem winder that included this nugget:

"This filibuster will go on to about 1:00 in the morning and then we will find out who the true conservatives in this town are!"

It turns out that there are about eight of them.

The establishment Republicans were quick to point out that this was in no way an abandonment of conservative principles, since all the new spending was totally offset by reductions in other spending. What they weren't as eager to point out was that these offsets are scheduled to kick in ten years from now when, hopefully, most of this current crop of spenders are dead! Oh, and just to make this deal even more perfect, it features that most time honored tradition of Washington budgetary quackery, it speeds up by one month a 2.3 billion dollar payment from November to October to make the numbers add up.

Beautiful.

So, once again, the wheels of leviathan grind on. Politicians pay lip service to balancing the budget and reining in the debt while doing the exact opposite. But at this point, will an extra trillion here or there really matter? What the heck? Let's just pretend that none of this budget stuff matters. Let's believe in the growth fairy, let's keep letting the Federal Reserve print more money. As long as we keep building more weapons and dreaming up new entitlements, who really cares?