National Debt, the New Raw Deal

"Then there is the question of national debt. We are now projected to run a record $1.7 trillion deficit -- and may add $9 trillion to our existing $11 trillion in aggregate debt over the next eight years. The president, though, has outlined vast new entitlement programs in health care, education, environmental programs, and infrastructure. The problem, of course, is that we have not earned enough money to pay for any of these additional expenditures. Again, the glamorous ends get the attention, never the mundane means of how to obtain them. Americans became wealthy and strong through unique self-reliance, common sense, and delayed gratification. And we -- or our children -- will soon become poor precisely because we hold on to the romance that producing food and fuel and saving money are icky tasks to be ignored or left to others. Until we change that attitude, we'll keep borrowing and spending on ourselves what we have not yet earned -- all the way to bankruptcy."
--Hoover Institution historian Victor Davis Hanson