WASHINGTON D.C.—Politicians have stopped talking about the national debt, which has reached an unsustainable rate. Trillion dollar deficits became the norm during the Reagan administration, and since that time every president has felt that they don’t have to worry about the issue. They leave it for the next administration. Only during the Clinton administration did the paralyzing amount of federal deficit spending start on the decline. Since 2000, the federal deficit has tripled, and there seems to be no end in sight.

Part of the problem is that partisan politicians and parties, such as the Tea Party, may argue about the deficit, but that isn’t their real issue. How can we expect to have any real debate on cutting government spending when we focus on non-issues? For example, when the First Lady asked schools to feed children a healthier diet, a non-issue ensued. Sarah Palin and the Tea Party then claimed, “Michelle Obama is attempting to use the federal government to force our schools to feed children what she feels is right, while taking our choice away.” The absurdity of it all is that these very same Republican and right-leaning people celebrated First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no to drugs” campaign as well as supported both First Lady Laura Bush’s and her mother-in-law’s fight for children’s literacy. It is unfair to expect the Obama administration to take on any big issues with an election year looming in 2012, and whenever the president speaks about serious issues, the frantic and already disproven allegations of his being a Kenyan-born Muslim become headline news on Fox News Channel all over again. 

After being called a Muslim and a terrorist, who could blame the president for trying to stay out of the contentious fiscal issues such as our nation’s national debt? We need the president and the republican-led Congress to both show maturity and to stop funding any non essential government spending and to put everything including the defense budget on the table and to cut spending in every department. Perhaps and hopefully some government departments will be cut all together and shut down. With necessities such as war spending, Medicare and Social Security also being looked at seriously where cuts can also be made to the entitlement system and to seriously reorganize the federal government in a way that will change our current path to fiscal insolvency.

There is no government department from Agriculture to the IRS that can remain at the rate and size of spending levels which now exist. Americans are going to also have to expect a tax hike, which we all hate and despise, but our deficit must in this generation start going down again, much like it had done in the 1990s.

Americans are going to have to start behaving like adults. Politicians are going to have to suffer consequences for lying on each other and using slanderous and vile names to describe each other, and we must leave partisan politics on the side of the road and travel as one nation together, treating our fiscal health as if it’s a war for our very survival.

All of my friends know that this is a serious issue, but none of them care about anything except their political party winning elections. We have turned into a hyper-partisan nation that is now more closely resembling the Middle East than our European counterparts. It is time to restart the nation. As Ronald Reagan once said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Our issues domestically have to be dealt with, examined and decided on very quickly. The U.S. still has a chance to turn our nation’s economy around again, but we need everyone to stop the partisan politics, to put our nation first and to be willing to sacrifice to bring our national debt back to a point where it’s manageable.

Please pray for our troops who are stationed overseas, many of which are directly in harms way fighting those who wish to do us harm.