Humbug for Everyone: Hilary set to run for president of the great state of absurdity...

The Daily Reckoning
Ouzilly, France
Monday, August 07, 2006

"A lot of Americans can't work any harder, borrow any more, or save any less," says the sage senator from the great state of New York, Hilary Clinton. She is running for president of the United States of America, so far unannounced, on a "Humbug for Everyone" platform, betting that she can tap into the alienated middle-class vote.

It's the "American Dream," she offered in last week's stump speech in Colorado. But what she is really offering the United States is the idle daydream that it can improve its standards of living with more claptrap and swindles. She promises a "fair wage, access to college, home ownership, and a path out of poverty into the middle class."

And there we have to stop. Our sides hurt too much from laughing. This is, after all, summer, and in the spirit of it, we permit ourselves to relax, dress down, ramble irrelevantly, and have a guffaw.

How will Senator Clinton provide all these fine things? How will she raise wages in the face of two billion Asian competitors? How will she provide greater access to college? How could she possibly increase home ownership, when homes are already in the hands of millions of people who can't afford them? What road out of poverty still lies undiscovered? Every one we have ever heard of is clogged with traffic...going in the opposite direction.

From the middle class back...to destitution.

We will give you a little soupcon of how the Hilary program works. In 2005, the federal government, of which after all she is an important part, spent $318 billion more than it took in - providing bread and circuses to the voters. That number was only according to the press releases. The government's own auditors, meanwhile, sticking with standard accounting principles, put the loss at $760 billion. And if the true measure of the deficit were taken - including Social Security and Medicare - it would total about $3.5 trillion.

This same government - now declaiming in the hectoring accents of the Senator from New York - proposes another "American Dream." Each child born in America will get a "baby bond" worth $500. Alas, the poor baby's share of the total federal debt is far closer to $500,000 than to $500. Baby bond? Compared to the debt they have laid on, it is not even a spermatozoon of a bond. And the new dream is so hollow, it is closer to a nightmare.

The "American Dream" was that anyone could come to the New World, enjoy the privilege of being left alone, and make what he could of himself.

Hilary Clinton's offer does not restore the dream, but takes out the last scrap of heart in it. Now, we are all being harnessed to debt from the "baby bond" to the grave.

Yes, dear reader, it is the new American nightmare, haunted by bamboozles, bribes, and boondoggles. The getting...the spending...the borrowing...the empty money...the decaying institutions...the threadbare habits...the corrupted thoughts...