Since 1947, just two years after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has maintained what is known as a "Doomsday Clock."  This clock is reset annually and is supposed to measure approximately how close the world is to the apocalypse due to a man-made catastrophe, with midnight representing the apocalypse and however many minutes before midnight representing how close mankind is to causing it.

Today, as I learn that the U.S. national debt has just eclipsed $30 trillion, it appears more and more likely by the day that our country is soon going to reach financial midnight.  On top of that, the federal budget is closing in swiftly on $3 trillion.

Now, most fiscal conservatives are not surprised that the left-wing imbeciles in the White House and the Capitol Building are running up massive quantities of debt and burdening the American taxpayer excessively with the government's bills.  I mean, hell, more than $2.5 trillion was spent on just four acts of Congress by October of 2020.  And let's not forget the Biden administration's fool's gold, the bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021, which, apparently, none of the 17 Republican senators who voted for its passage bothered to read.  If these sell-outs had bothered to read the contents of the bill, they would find a smorgasbord of pork, like the "Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program," which was allocated $500 million literally to demolish perfectly good infrastructure and completely redesign the layout of entire communities to make access to them more "equitable."  (This is the whole "racist roads" hogwash.)  They would also find that the bill contained an allotment of $7.5 billion for the construction of a network of half a million electric vehicle chargers nationwide, even though, by the Transportation Department's own admission, electric vehicles accounted for only 2.3% of car sales in 2020, or one-third of China's E.V. car sales (because the moron in the Oval Office thinks everything is better in China, just ask Hunter).

But no, 17 members of the Senate who were supposed to be fiscally responsible decided to obsequiously bow down to Caesar Biden's demands.

But then, are they actually fiscally responsible?  In the past few years, Republicans have become nearly as fiscally reckless as Democrats.  Donald Trump, in just four years, added $8 trillion to the national debt.  Barack Obama, who added more to the debt than all of his predecessors combined, added only $9 trillion in eight!  And Jeff Van Drew, who made headlines when he switched political parties from Democrat to Republican shortly after he was elected to Congress, and who also happens to be the representative of the district in which I live in New Jersey, voted in favor of the bill in the House — and this man claims to be a fiscal conservative.

Trump wasn't the only fiscally reckless Republican spender in recent memory.  According to a 2019 report by the New York Times, the war in Afghanistan, initiated under the aegis of George W. Bush, cost the United States, up to that point, $2 trillion.  The two-decade conflict, which resulted in the tragic loss of 2,400 American soldiers, was financed largely by borrowed money, and the American taxpayer will be shelling out tax dollars through the end of next year to pay $500 billion in interest alone.

So, as bad as Democrats are on and for the economy, and they are disastrous enough by themselves, Republicans, since the turn of the 21st century, haven't been much better.  That fact must be acknowledged before we can hope to turn back time on the fiscal doomsday clock.

The Republican Party used to be the natural antidote to the poison that the Democrats introduced to the economy.  We are talking about a party that used to be for low taxes, balanced budgets, and limited government spending, and that used to be hawks on the debt, dive-bombing any Democrat who dared introduce an asinine bill with a ludicrous price tag.

The Republican Party should start taking its cues on financial issues from libertarian fiscal responsibility champions among their ranks, like Rand Paul, one of the few voices of sanity and truth remaining on Capitol Hill.  Caesar Biden and his legion of progressive cretins have already crossed the economic Rubicon.  If you don't want to join him, you must make sure you elect fiscally responsible Republicans who are not willing to wade into those waters for their own political gain or their own personal avarice.  This means you will have to audit every political candidate you vote for henceforth to ensure that all of them are faithful to the principle of fiscal responsibility.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Biden administration's discretionary budget request for fiscal year 2022 is already up to $1.5 trillion, a sum 8.6% higher than last year's budget.  The worst part is that if this ghastly number is approved by Congress, it won't even be enough to cover one piece of legislation on Biden's wish list (Build Back Better), which was projected to be more than $2 trillion and could reach up to $6 trillion over a few years.  Inevitably, a number of "Republican" congressmen will cave to Biden's budget request, just as they did to the Infrastructure Bill.  Why more people are not concerned about this mystifies me, but then I remember that Caesar Biden has made it possible that being on unemployment and collecting stimulus checks is more lucrative than actually working and earning money.  This may be why there isn't more of an uproar — because the lazy degenerates who would rather live off entitlement programs (that they are not entitled to at all) than work for a living would throw a huge temper tantrum.

One way or another, this fiscal insanity will come to an end, and the final act can end in one of two ways: either a strong force of fiscally responsible politicians are elected in the midterms and replace the creatures from the Black Lagoon there right now, and put an end to Biden's insane tax-and-spend policies, or the establishment continues with its "let them eat cake," attitude, pushes the economy off the cliff, and plunges the nation into an economic crisis unparalleled since the Great Depression, essentially putting future generations of Americans in debtors' prisons from birth.  

You choose.  The clock is ticking.

Image: Tim Sackton via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.