By John Griffin Miller

Senator Dan Coats of Indiana (yes, he REALLY is a US Senator, he just isn’t gonna get all braggy about it!) yesterday sent a letter out to his email list renewing his push for a Balanced Budget Amendment. He does brag just a little that he has been supporting this for many years, having pushed for this amendment when he was a senator in the 90’s. Bet you didn’t know that, either! He also was a US Representative and Ambassador to Germany! So there!

Coats understands that it is the mission of the federal government, just like all families and businesses in America, to balance their checkbooks. I’m sure that his 3 children, if they were starving and Dan’s lucrative jobs in government or law firms didn’t allow him to provide food or housing, knew that they should go hungry and spend the night in the homeless shelter. Coats knows that Hoosier families and businesses would rather starve than receive any of the billions and billions of dollars in federal support that the state receives from Washington and passes along to them.

The Senator likes to point out that since the Amendment failed in 1997, that the national debt has increased by $11 trillion, with only a big part of that due to colossal tax cuts to rich people, wars of choice that were conveniently “off the books” and unregulated banking and investment that caused the economy and revenue to spiral downward. We needed to spend these trillions, because the government needs to stay out of people’s lives, reward the “job creators” like the mega-rich and the Wall Street banksters, and protect our homeland from foreign threats, both real and imaginary, unless there is some philosophical reason to do otherwise (gay marriage, abortion, etc.)

My fellow Hoosiers are all about cutting spending to the bone, or maybe beyond. (What do you call it when you cut to the “organs”?) They understand that even though our kids might have to starve, we must drastically reduce the federal spending that amounts to 23% or so of our economy and that will surely make the Depression worse. They surely support imposing austerity on themselves like the Europeans have tried, which doubles or triples the unemployment rate, must take a back seat to balancing that doggone checkbook.

Pay no attention to the phony threats or occasional severe government interference in our lives or the lack of job creation when the last group of winners were in charge from 2001 to 2008. Do not worry that the austerity he supports will actually make the dreaded deficit and national debt even LARGER—we must get our income and outlays to become equal!

Our senator likes to remind us that his Senate hasn’t even passed a budget in almost 1,400 days, even though archaic rules don’t allow the majority to do anything unless the Minority Leader and his troops (including my Senator!) go along. And just because the “budget” that the senate hasn’t passed is essentially a non-binding resolution without any real effect in law, it is still important to get this passed. Or at least to crow about it.

Just like a Balanced Budget Amendment that has zero chance of passing during a Depression.

Heck with this, I’m moving to Kentucky, where they have reasonable senators, like Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul!

Oh, wait…