America’s Last Chance

March 1, 2025 by Fletch Daniels

What a difference a few months make. This time last year, we were hurtling toward societal collapse. The government's growth rate and requisite spending had hit such obscene levels that the question of whether we, like Wile E. Coyote, had raced over the edge of a cliff was no longer theoretical.

Four years of Kamala Harris as president without an injection of some corrective mechanism first would have imploded America like the Death Star. Frankly, the path the Biden puppet masters put us on was so cataclysmically destructive that recovery is still no sure thing.

The math remains ugly. The key statistic is that around 40% of every tax dollar taken goes toward paying interest on the national debt. That number would have been mere child’s play to a Democrat administration. Forty percent? We can do better than that. Push the throttle to Ludicrous Speed. We’re going where nobody has gone before. Nothing short of 100 percent is acceptable.

It always comes down to the math, and math doesn’t lie. It’s brutally honest for anyone wise enough to pay attention.

This is the defining national security issue of our time. Building a strong military doesn’t matter when your biggest rival, China, will never have to face it. All the Chinese need to do is wait until we collapse from within. This is why the work of President Trump and DOGE is essential. This is our last chance. Elon Musk gets that. At President Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, he pointed out what should be painfully obvious to everyone: we cannot sustain $2-trillion deficits. That’s a mathematical certainty even a first-grader should be able to see.

Our only chance is to cut government down to what is necessary, just as our founding fathers envisioned. We don’t have the luxury of nonsensical spending. The administration should repeat this ad nauseam, explaining the math, until the broader public understands. Far too few people still comprehend the scope of the problem.

Any political party that does not acknowledge the basic math is unserious and should not be trusted anywhere near the levers of power. Considering that Democrats have positioned themselves as the party of government, they are incapable of solving a problem they won’t even acknowledge exists. They don’t want to solve it because they’ve benefited handsomely from the arrangement, in wealth and power.

For the typical Democrat, it’s a simple equation. Democrat government bureaucracy plus NGOs equals massive graft with a side of political power. Two billion dollars to an NGO linked to Stacey Abrams? Sure, why the heck not? It’s not as though the taxpayers deserve their money.

Lee Zeldin, auditioning for understatement of the year, noted, “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023, was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.” Concerning? That’s one way to put it.

Then again, money funneled through NGOs to enrich politicians and their supporters is perhaps preferable to taxpayer dollars spent arming the world’s most evil regimes. It should bring Americans great comfort knowing they are handing over their money to their bureaucratic betters who think spending a mere $310 million of it for a Palestinian cement factory is a grand idea. Hmm. I wonder what they will do with all that cement!

I have yet to hear a single Democrat publicly acknowledge that a debt problem even exists, let alone the existence-threatening depth of that problem, far deeper even than the baby-murdering Hamas tunnels they helped to fund. The few who pay lip service to the problem ignore the spending side of the equation and want to raise taxes to infinity and beyond. There aren’t enough taxes in the world to address a debt problem of well over $100K per American. That’s not even working Americans.

In Job, the Bible describes a fearsome, untamable beast called Leviathan. That is an apt metaphor for the blob of unelected bureaucrats, mostly loyal to the Democrats, who constitute the federal bureaucracy.

I’ve had the opportunity to observe the reaction to efforts to cut the federal Leviathan from inside the belly of that beast, and to say that people are in a state of shock is a mild understatement. In a matter of days, President Trump has forever pierced government workers’ belief that they are untouchable.

Utah senator John Curtis recommended that we add a dose of compassion to the efforts. I don’t disagree. Some of the rhetoric around the cuts has been unfortunate and unhelpful. Plenty of unproductive and subversive workers are losing their jobs, but a lot of good people are also caught in the crossfire.

Most Americans intuitively understand that these cuts must happen. At the same time, many of them will be turned off by the appearance of a celebratory attitude toward it, which also takes the focus off the real villains in the story: the politicians who drove so much spending that these cuts are necessary.

For those who watched fellow Americans who lost their jobs gleefully told to learn to code, or to get a useless green job, or to enjoy unemployment unless you allow Sauron to jab you with immune system–crushing needles, a healthy dose of schadenfreude is understandable.

However, compassion is still central to the debate. So let’s talk compassion. At the end of the day, cutting government is about compassion, and not necessarily the kind Senator Curtis meant. Securing the future of our kids and grandkids is a courageous act of kindness and compassion and returns hope to America.

We often hear appeals to compassion on the left, particularly in the immigration debate. Unfettered and government-sanctioned illegal immigration brought many evils, one of the worst was the added strain it put on an already fiscally terminal patient, pushing that patient toward its final breaths. That is not compassionate to anyone.

The great Mark Steyn once pointed out that there is nothing compassionate about societal collapse. Real compassion involves making the tough decisions to safeguard the future of not just Americans, but people across the globe whose world will darken if the light from the shining city that Ronald Reagan envisioned goes out.

One of my coworkers asked me if I would still have voted for President Trump if I had thought it could cost my job. She was surprised by my answer, but it was not a particularly hard question. Of course, because this is not about any individual person. It is about the future of our nation. All Americans should be cheering on the efforts of President Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE, because those efforts might just represent America’s last chance.

Fletch also writes fiction. You can check out his latest novel on Amazon.