MY TURN: Idaho senators need to be fiscal hawks

If you check Senator Crapo's website, he runs a ticker-tape style of National Debt at the top of his website. Today, his numbers show $37.9 trillion in debt. Our current U.S. debt ceiling cap is $40 trillion. Bondholders carrying $5 trillion of U.S. Bonds include Japan, Canada, Belgium and Ireland. To exceed that cap, it goes back to the Hill to be expanded — a cliff we should not allow. 

A stock-market redline selloff of bonds should scare every bank and investor. Every American citizen has $120,000 USD in debt on their shoulders; taxpayers have $287,000, as we have compounded debt for the past 46 years since 1980 at $4,000/person. Watching stock market jitters today is a BIG RED FLAG. We are in a fiscal firestorm.

The problem is the Federal Reserve announced that we reached our $40 trillion debt ceiling Tuesday, Aug. 18,. Yes, math can be a challenge, but I question whether our Republicans have a new math going — pretending that $2 trillion in tariffs have actually lowered the debt ceiling. Meanwhile, the Courts have determined that tariffs are an illegal tax on citizens and must be refunded to the trading partners. Citizens were hit by those tariffs and will never see a dime returned to their grocery cart or auto purchase. 

As one of only three states that still supports the POTUS in the White House, our senators have failed to rein in a profligate deficit spender. Taxpayers do not NEED a billion-dollar ballroom and bunker, a peeling blue Reflecting Pool, a white paint job on the DOJ Building limestone that will also peel, gold leaf on the Memorial Bridge stallions, any new Corinthian capitals or helipads at the White House, or the money burn-through of an Iranian War. Not a peep from Risch, Crapo, Simpson or Fulcher against wild rebranding beautification spending. 

When projected expenditures exceed income earned, as our local cities have recently identified, it is time to get tough, cut spending, add income and tighten belts. Our current Republicans across all their political monopoly have done nothing as Fiscal Hawks in this "Golden Age of Trump." We need a full change of the guard to rescue a country in denial, with fresh eyes, before the 1929 Depression is reenacted with no FDR to save us.