"Warning: The deficits are coming!" (John Fund, WSJ):

David Walker sounds like a modern-day Paul Revere as he warns about the country's perilous future. "We suffer from a fiscal cancer," he tells a meeting of the National Taxpayers Union, the nation's oldest anti-tax lobby. "Our off balance sheet obligations associated with Social Security and Medicare put us in a $56 trillion financial hole—and that's before the recession was officially declared last year. America now owes more than Americans are worth—and the gap is growing!"

His audience sits in rapt attention. A few years ago these antitax activists would have been polite but a tad restless listening to the former head of the Government Accountability Office, the nation's auditor-in-chief. Higher taxes is what hikes their blood pressure the most, but the profligate spending of the Bush and Obama administrations has put them in a mood to listen to this green-eyeshade Cassandra. "He's so unlike most politicians," says Sharron Angle, a former state legislator from Nevada, "his message is clear, detailed and with no varnish."

This historical analogy is crazy in most ways, but in two respects America today bears a weird resemblance to France before the 1789 Revolution: (a) it is being paralyzed by an unmanageable debt burden, and (b) status-seeking. In pre-Revolutionary France, the status symbol du jour was public office, and I've read that people would buy offices for more than the value of the bribes they would recover, just for the prestige. Today, the status symbol du jour is education. My hunch is that what the country really needs is for less people to go to lots of school and for more people to start businesses. (I realize the irony of my saying this.) And I actually suspect people might even learn more (more about life, more building of character) that way.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that the deficit and the status-seeking problems may be related. Why start a business if a mind-bogglingly indebted government seems likely, sooner or later, to confiscate whatever wealth you create if you succeed? Even if an education is worth less than the money and foregone income you spend to get it, at least the government can't take it away!