(Pennants at the Navy-Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center. Photo Socotra.)

“The Administration’s bill to raise the debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.”
– Senator Barak Obama, D-IL, 2006

I just drove in from VA Beach and a quick visit with ENS Socotra and his classmates. The Hubrismobile is a swell way to travel on a sunny and cool July weekend. If it seems like a mobile fool’s paradise, I guess that is just the way it is.

There was a great party to celebrate the wedding of a classmate’s wedding after the more formal 25th Anniversary of the Navy-Marine Corps Training Center Friday morning. It was a little bittersweet. The class-load is high right now as the training center struggles to get the kids through. The budget outlook has only about 90 kids coming through all next year, a reflection of what is coming for the whole defense establishment.

It is a sobering prospect for those of us in the business, and I suppose it is time to join the rest of the country in the new reality. I confess I am more than a little perplexed by how we got here, and the remedies being proposed to get us out of it.

What with the driving, I was off the net and subjected to the take on the budget struggle from the voices of three differing radio stations along the way.

The President’s bully megaphone seems to be working, and the press seems to be very much in his corner, though he has yet to put anything on the table that he is willing to talk about publicly. One opponent described the $4 Trillion grand design as including a Trillion that will be avoided interest payments, which strikes me as a bogus saving, and another Trillion from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which fails the math test.

The closest I can get is a little north of $900 Billion, which leaves a hundred billion short of a real number, which used to be a big number, but we have gone so far beyond reality that we appear to be living in an alternate universe.

My understanding is that the restoration of the Clinton-era rates will garner around $60 Billion per year, which taken over the bizarre new budget horizon of a dozen years would start to scrape a billion. The Bush-era tax brackets expire at the end of 2012 unless Congress does something to extend them, which is highly unlikely. Accordingly, I am mystified by what we are talking about.

I assume the President is talking about taxes above and beyond that, but he doesn’t seem to be saying much about his plans, which from what I can gather is going to consist of those taxes, interest avoidance of a trillion, and some unspecified cuts to Defense and unspecified “efficiencies” in the entitlement world.

That is all nonsense, of course, and will never happen. The President has managed to rack up an additional $4 Trillion in debt on his watch alone, and sooner or later he is going to have to take ownership of his share and stop campaigning. In the meantime, the idiots on both sides of the aisle want to tag each other with the blame, since the next election is apparently more important than the future of our kids and grandkids.

The President by-passed the national media late last week to talk to the more friendly local DC television outlets. He of course was talking to his base n the Democratic Party, and it was enough to make me sit bolt upright. Here are his words:

“I say that if we truly believe in a progressive vision of our society, we have the obligation to prove that we can afford our commitments.  If we believe that government can make a difference in people’s lives, we have the obligation to prove that it works.”

The record of the last two administrations is perfectly clear. Government run like this does not work. The Republicans managed to hose up the economy by lack of attention and oversight, to put it charitably, and the Democrats, with supermajorities in both houses of Congress and the White House could not produce a budget.

Instead, they labored mightily to produce a gigantic health care bill that was so long and so convoluted that none of the idiots managed to read it.

I don’t know about you, but I would really like the government to stop making a difference in my life.

Between the asleep-at-the-switch Bush Administration and the spendthrift Obamanauts, the government fostered a housing bubble that cost me a hundred grand on my little apartment and now is merrily running up a tab that will inevitably destroy the currency, wipe out our savings, devalue our pensions if we were lucky enough to get one, and gut social security.

What is most galling about the rhetoric is the assertion that the government, between Federal, State and Local incarnations, already takes half what I make. Half. Then, the President has the effrontery to scold me that I am not doing my share.

What I would like is for the government to leave me alone to pursue liberty and happiness on my own. There never was any guarantee that I would get them, but the pursuit was supposed to free for all.

Now it is just a freaking free ride for those greedy Wall Street bastards and some Bozos from Chicago.

(Tony, Sam, Vic and ENS Socotra.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com