OUR OLD FRIEND RED INK

The current finance crisis has shown us that many emperors do not have any clothes. Many institutions cannot sustain themselves out of current funds.

Bobbing amid all the economic wreckage, I find Republican politicians hilarious these days. I cannot listen to them decrying big federal deficits with a straight face.

The federal government has lead the way into debt for well over two and half centuries – with major growth spurts in the Lincoln Administration to finance the War Between the States, and in the Wilson Administration to finance our involvement in the Great War, and in the Roosevelt Administration to finance our involvement in the Second World War.

The Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford administrations all had big public debts. The Reagan administration increased public debt at an astronomical level, as did Bush II administration on an even grander scale of red ink.

So when Republicans decry the Obama administration’s public debt ratios and rattle off scare stories about saddling our grandchildren and great grand children with hideous and unmanageable debt – my response is simple:

things should not be any different now than they have been in the past.