We hear a lot of rhetoric in Washington.  Boy do we hear a lot of rhetoric.  What’s interesting is that rarely is there bigger opportunity for discovering that “what goes around, comes around” than in political rhetoric.  It is interesting to move quotes from yesteryear into today.  Here follows a speech that could be one delivered on the House or Senate floor today by a Tea Party Republican.  It was not.  Read through to the bottom and guess who spoke this very eloquent argument defining the folly of repeatedly boosting the national debt ceiling rather than making the hard budgetary decisions required to right our nation’s foundering fiscal ship.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.  It is a sign that the U.S. government cannot pay its own bills.  It is a sign that we now depend upon on-going financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies…”

“Increasingly America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally.  Leadership means that the ‘buck stops here.’  Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.  America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.  Americans deserve better.”

Freshman Senator Barack Obama, D-IL on March 16, 2006, explaining his decision to vote against raising the debt ceiling when it was $8.6 Trillion ($8,600,000,000,000) scarcely more than half of the current debt level.