Why Democrats Don’t Care about $9.7 Trillion in Debt

March 9, 2010 12:00 A.M.

As reported by the Washington Post: “President Obama’s proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.”

CNN adds, “Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.”

The Post continues: “The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] and the White House [are] . . . both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year — a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama’s policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.

“Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said.”

CNN notes this particularly chilling prediction from the CBO: “By 2020 . . . debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90% of GDP. That’s up from 53% of GDP in 2009.”

I suspect that most Americans, if asked whether these numbers trouble the Democratic leadership and President Obama, would answer in the affirmative.

They would be wrong.

They would be wrong not because the Democratic party and the president are economic illiterates or bad individuals, but because the Democratic party and the president are leftists, and most Americans, including most Democrats, do not understand the Left. They may understand liberalism, but President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and most Democratic representatives and senators are not liberals; they are leftists. Few Americans understand the difference.

They do not realize, for example, that there is no major difference between the American Democratic party and the leftist social democratic parties of Western Europe. They do not know that, from Karl Marx to Barack Obama, the Left (as opposed to liberals) has never created wealth because it has never been interested in creating wealth; it is interested in redistributing wealth.

Therefore, unprecedented and unsustainable debt that will negatively affect most Americans’ quality of life, render the dollar increasingly undesirable, and undermine America’s prestige and power in the world — these developments do not particularly disturb the Left. They may trouble the president, the Democratic party, and their allies on some political level, but that pales in comparison to the Left’s zeal for what it really wants: a huge government overseeing a giant welfare state and a country with far fewer rich Americans.

Achieving those goals is far more important than preventing a decline in the American quality of life. The farther left one goes on the spectrum, the more contempt one sees for the present quality of American life; the Left regularly mocks many of the symbols of that life, from the three-bedroom suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence to the SUV, or almost any car, in the driveway (Americans should be traveling on public buses and trains and by riding bicycles, they believe).

As for the dollar, I can bear personal testimony to the decline of its prestige. I am writing this column in Morocco. In Casablanca, my wife and I and another couple hired a Moroccan driver for the day. When it came time to pay, the man refused to accept dollars; he wanted to be paid in either euros or Moroccan dirhams. Yes, dirhams rather than dollars. But the demise of the dollar as the world’s currency disturbs the Left as much as does America’s not getting a gold medal in curling at the Winter Olympics.

And as for America wielding less power in the world, the American Left considers that to be a positive development. They think it is the world community as embodied in the United Nations that should wield power throughout the world, not an “overstretched,” “imperialist,” and “militarist” United States.

I used to believe that the Left and the Right had similar goals for America, that they just differed in the means they wanted to use to get there. I was mistaken. The Left has a very different vision of America than those who hold to America’s founding values, most especially individualism and small government. Their vision is one in which a once-in-a-lifetime chance to establish a giant welfare state dominated by the Left is worth any price — even America’s steep financial decline.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.