An Arkansas Toothpick

Federal spending is grossly out of control. The government does not need carefully managed cuts at the margins with a few tweaks to the tax code to further soak the rich as the Democrat elite suggest but massive and deep spending reductions across the board. Raising the debt ceiling fixes essentially nothing. A true accounting of the severity of the problem is well over the fourteen and a half trillion dollars that now comprise the ceiling on Federal debt, but according to Pimco's tremendously perceptive Bill Gross, the unfunded Federal obligations already amount to more than one hundred trillion dollars when Social Security and the future cost of medical care at the Federal level are added in- a chasm that is already quite likely unrecoverable. There is a tool that needs to be figuratively employed to reverse the decline and it is not a scalpel, but the much less subtle hacking instrument of Jim Bowie. To save the nation and even the entitlement programs themselves, there must be serious cutting, means tests, and change in eligibility requirements to programs now. America can not delay until a new President gains the office- tomorrow is already too late.