. There has been no fiscal responsibility since the Clinton/Gingrich years and there still isn't any.

What do you mean the Clinton/Gingrich years?
Try Reagan/Bush, during twelve years in office, they did not submit a single balanced budget. As a matter of fact, they took a National Debt of a under a trillion and grew it to over 3 Trillion. Not bad for twelve years of peace and prosperity…

The last politician in America who was honest about the connection between revenue and spending was Walter Mondale.

And here's that condom thread.

Tidbits, at the time the condom discussion was going on there was a view among many on the left that any spending would somehow stimulate the economy regardless of what it was being spent on. I'm not sure whether that view is still widely held or not.

I don't think the US is a country of freeloaders, I think most people understand the necessity to work and are willing to do so. The US is by and large a country with a very poor understanding of basic economics though, and seems to regard the government as an endless font of money with very little understanding of where the money comes from.

Deficit spending means government debt that has to be financed. Financing a federal deficit sucks up monetary resources that would otherwise be available to private enterprise which produces permanent jobs far more quickly and far more efficiently than government. Witness the Clinton administration when, working with a Republican congress, the government created surpluses, thus debt capital was made available for business, thus a huge growth spurt.

In addition to choking the credit supply to private business, unsustainable deficits are financed in part by sale of treasury bonds to foreign governments and interests, reducing our leverage in international negotiations.

The kind of deficits in store for us as a result of a reluctance to raise taxes and an insatiable desire for increased services threaten to permanently weaken America both economically and internationally. Unfortunately, politicians are not courageous enough to make the hard choices and the voters are not enlightened enough to vote for those who would.

I recall a post a few weeks ago concerning half a million or so being spent on the stimulus-dulling effects of condom usage. To no surprise, there was strong advocacy among the commenters for this expenditure. The point is that every government expenditure has some constituency, often vocal. Similarly, every proposal to increase taxes has a vocal opposition, see cap and trade.

America has become a society of freeloaders who want government to provide their every whim without being willing to foot the bill. One wonders how many government programs would be deemed necessary if each had to be funded up front by attaching the pro rata amount from each taxpayer's checking account. It might not be pretty, but we might find out just which programs are really “necessary” and which are not.