When is the “right time” to quit smoking? Well, the right time to quit was “yesterday.” But since that’s not possible, the next-best time is “today.” The worst time to quit is “tomorrow” — because tomorrow you may find a reason to put it off another day, and another, and another.
It’s hard to quit, longtime smokers will say. And they are right: It can be incredibly difficult. But with their lives on the line — and with the likelihood of devastating their families if they die prematurely from smoking — many smokers will at least acknowledge that they should try to kick the habit.
Some, though, will downplay their problem or say they’ll deal with it “later.” Unfortunately, “later” never seems to come — until there are painful or even tragic consequences.
As a nation that is every bit as addicted to deficit spending as smokers are to nicotine, we evidently have not reached the point of admitting we have a spending problem. We seem content to let future generations deal with our calamitous federal spending spree — through higher taxes, sharp cuts in government services or both.
The trouble is, as the years pass, those “future generations” get closer and closer. It’s no longer your “grandchildren’s grandchildren” who will have to deal with the mess we are creating. It’s your children and your grandchildren. And yes, even “we” will have to face the economic distress caused by reckless Washington spending, as programs such as Medicare are threatened with bankruptcy just a few short years from now.
Even in the coming months, millions of Americans are going to be confronted with painful realities, not only because of the current economic crisis and high unemployment, but because the aid provided to states under the $862 billion federal “stimulus” program is running out fast — and the massive “stimulation” of the private sector that all that money was supposed to create didn’t occur.
“States are looking at a financial cliff because federal stimulus funds will disappear this year before state tax revenues have recovered from their worst pummeling in decades,” the Times Free Press reported recently.
In Georgia, lawmakers face the prospect of $1.5 billion to $2 billion in budget cuts, including big education cuts.
In Tennessee, $900 million in spending cuts were staved off in recent years by federal stimulus funds. But now that the non-stimulative “stimulus” is drying up and state revenues aren’t there to replace it, cuts can’t be avoided.
So states only delayed — but did not eliminate — the pain of budget cuts. And now our nation is hundreds of billions of dollars deeper in debt, thanks to a stimulus that has bloated government but left the private sector mostly high and dry.
We are worse off than we were without the stimulus, and the “remedy” will be far more difficult than if government had not kept trying to pick winners and losers in the market by showering favored industries with stimulus cash and bailing out others.
As with smoking, the best time for Washington to stop its unchecked spending is “yesterday.” The next-best time is “today.” But we’re afraid Washington is going to pick “tomorrow” — meaning it is going to wait until economic catastrophe strikes before it owns up to its spending addiction and takes steps to break the habit.
The harm that procrastination creates may make the current economic crisis seem mild by comparison.