O Tempora!

A swimmer – a very strong swimmer – is churning through the ocean. He is such a strong swimmer that he seems oblivious to the huge millstone around his neck and even more gigantic anchor tied around his waist He swims towards what looks like an island in the distance – an island that appears to be coming rapidly closer. But it only appears to get closer because it is a cliff rising higher and higher out of the water. There is also a reef between him and the island – a reef that becomes ever larger and rockier.

As he swims, sirens in the water shout about what the swimmer is doing wrong and encourage him to get help from the jellyfish floating nearby. The sirens tell him to swim this way or that, and the jellyfish sting him if he doesn’t comply. Together, these groups keep adding weight to his anchor or his millstone – just to see if he can stay afloat. If one of our swimmer’s arms or legs tires, the sirens scream to the jellyfish, who attach a flotation device to that arm or leg. But they put a weight equivalent to that buoyancy on his opposite side. Each time the sirens and jellyfish do this, the reef gets bigger. The sirens warn of an imaginary maelstrom just ahead, and the jellyfish claim that the swimmer needs weight added to his anchor and millstone – ballast to get through the non-existent storm.

Our swimmer, such is his strength, has been going along fairly well until now. During the recent leg of his trip, the jellyfish have made the swimmer go this way and that, and they have added a little here and a little there to our swimmer’s burdens. Indeed, the swimmer is floundering now, and the sirens keep warning him to get more help from the jellyfish. All the while, the jellyfish keep adding to the reef the sirens keep ignoring the cliff. It doesn’t look good for the swimmer, who would have a hard time getting over the reef and climbing the cliff even without the heavy weights dragging him down.

The swimmer is the US economy. The anchor is the $3 trillion federal budget that is taken annually from the economy. The millstone is the additional weight of $1 trillion in regulatory costs. The sirens are our wonderful mainstream media, who just love the spineless jellyfish who are our elected officials. Both of these groups claim that the government can help the economy by taking something from one area to try to float another, while adding to the reef of national debt. The phony maelstrom is climate change (formerly known as global warming). Finally, the island in the distance is the implicit debt that future entitlements will cost – nearly $100 trillion in a few decades for the twin pyramid schemes of Social Security and Medicare.

If the sirens of the media actually cared about the swimmer, they would call for the congressional jellyfish to grow spines. A vertebrate Congress would lighten the swimmer’s tax and regulatory load so he could keep himself afloat. They would stop meddling by trying to float one side while sinking the other. They would grind down the reef of debt by avoiding deficit spending. They would admit that the climate changes all the time and that the earth has actually cooled off in the last decade, despite humans’ use of fossil fuels. And they would do something about the insurmountable cliff of New Deal and Great Society ripoffs. If the congressional coelenterates don’t do the right thing, our economy will sink, not swim. And, though they may not know it, the media sirens and bureaucratic jellyfish will go down with it.