We Must Get Our Fiscal House in Order

Michele Bachmann | October 27, 2009 9:56 AM

Reuters is reporting that there is a very real possibility that the United States could lose its “AAA” rating if we do not take the necessary steps to reduce our deficit in the next three to four years. Moody’s lead analyst for the United States said very bluntly,

“The AAA rating of the U.S. is not guaranteed.”

At the end of this fiscal year (September 30, 2009), the U.S. government recorded a deficit $1.417 trillion, the highest it’s ever been in our nation’s history. Yet, this startling number has not fazed President Obama and Democrat leaders in Washington one bit and they continue to plow forward with their reckless spending agenda.

It’s hard to deny that a big contributor to this astronomical deficit was the $700-billion bank bailout program (known as TARP) passed back in October of 2008. Just last week, TARP Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky, who is in charge of overseeing the bailout program on behalf of the taxpayers, said that our economy may be at a greater risk now than we were at the time the program was put into place one year ago.

CNN’s Political Ticker has the story:

"These banks that were too big to fail are now bigger," Barofsky said. "Government has sponsored and supported several mergers that made them larger and that guarantee, that implicit guarantee of moral hazard, the idea that the government is not going to let these banks fail, which was implicit a year ago, is now explicit, we've said it. So if anything, not only have there not been any meaningful regulatory reform to make it less likely, in a lot of ways, the government has made such problems more likely.

"Potentially we could be in more danger now than we were a year ago," he added.

It seems the only thing Washington is good at is spending your money. There seems to be less than zero fiscal responsibility in Washington right now. With historic deficit and debt numbers, with Medicare and Social Security on the brink of insolvency, all they can think to do is pass a trillion-dollar government takeover of health care and a job killing cap-and-trade national energy tax. If we don’t get our fiscal house in order, future generations will surely inherit a broken nation.