From Investors Business Daily: If ‘Unsustainable’ Is New Normal, Collapse Is Closer Than We Think .

The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so.

The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08 and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his economics czar, Ms. Rose-Colored Glasses.

By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6%. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25% as a permanent feature of life.

But if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”:

“I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accommodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense.

That leaves Elmendorf’s alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah:

“Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads: I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began, the Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Did you get your pay raise this year? What’s that, you don’t work for the government? Yes you do, one way or another. Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan “taking action” to “resolve” that.

In the last month, the cost of insuring Greece’s sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be a hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best to just head for the hills.

Well this is just great.

Read the whole thing.

More from Hot Air’s Greenroom.

Cap-and-Trade, it’s next on the list and looks like it has a chance at passing the Senate. Read Energy Bill’s Proponents Prepare Counterattack and What did I tell ya? Lindsey Graham signs on to cap-and-tax.

Two recent articles at Real Clear Politics tell the unbelievable story of how a country awoke from the dark ages, making the transition from Global Warming hysteria and faux science to actual science:

Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?

‘A Tax on Thin Air’.

These links outline the sequence of events that occurred in Australia, a country that exploded the anthropogenic global warming myth and won the battle against their own version of job killing, tax raising cap-and-trade. Of import is Ian Pilmer’s book Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science.

Ian Plimer’s is the catalyst and pivot point that blew apart and exposed inconvenient truths that finally turned the Australian public against hysteria and back towards actual science. The book does such a good job that it changed the mind of a leading global warming hysteric – Paul Sheehan (see his comments below). It changed the course of the debate in Australia and lead to the death of climate change legislation as the tide turned in public opinion. In short, it is a myth de-bunker extraordinaire.

One of the most remarkable changes brought about by Pilmer’s book occurred on April 13, when leading global warming hysteric Paul Sheehan—who writes for the main Sydney newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, which has done as much to hype the threat of global warming as any Australian newspaper—reviewed Plimer’s book and admitted he was taken aback. He describes Plimer, correctly, as “one of Australia’s foremost Earth scientists,” and praised the book as “brilliantly argued” and “the product of 40 years’ research and breadth of scholarship.”

What does Plimer’s book say? Here is Sheehan’s summary:

Much of what we have read about climate change, [Plimer] argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive.”…

In response, this is Sheehan’s conclusion: “Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.” This cannot be interpreted as anything but a capitulation. It cedes to the global warming rejectionists the high ground of being “evidence-based,” and it accepts the characterization of the global warming promoters as dogmatic conformists.

I am sending a copy to my Representative and Senators and faxing each to demand the Ian Plimer be allowed to testify in Congress as a representative of clear-headed thinking and a champion of real science. Should my Representative and Senators refuse, I intend to work tirelessly to ensure they are unceremoniously shown the door.

Blast an email and link to this post. Sent it to friends, as well as local and national tea party organizations. If possible, raise enough money to send hundreds if not thousands of copies to each Senator and Representative. And fax – don’t call – your states Senators and your district’s Representative. A hand written fax is worth 100 emails. If you wish to also call, certainly it can’t hurt. Keep those fax machines running day and night. KILL Cap-and-trade.

In other news and opinion:

Looks like the Brits are figuring it out now: BBC notices that the world is not getting warmer.

Nobel Appease Prize fireworks: North Korea launches more missiles, Iran scoffs

DNC humor czar condemns Nobel Prize jokes

Video: White House communications chief whines about Fox News, media for nine minutes

From the Social Security Institute:

Mr. President, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, the authoritative source of legislative interpretation for all things tax related coming out of the Congress says in unambiguous terms that the individual health-insurance mandate in the Finance Committee bill will become part of the Internal Revenue Code. Further, the JCT chief of staff confirms that refusal to pay the associated excise tax ($1,900 per family) if one declines to purchase health insurance could lead to jail time and a $25,000 fine for tax evasion.

You say the individual health-insurance levy such as that contained in the Senate Finance Committee bill cannot be construed as a “tax.” The Finance Committee Chairman, however, calls it a tax, and the Joint Committee on Taxation says it will be part of the tax code and refusal to pay it will be prosecuted as tax evasion.

I’m not calling you a liar. I just don’t think you know what you are talking about. So why don’t you just shut up and stop confusing the American people who know a tax when they see one?

Mr. President – you’ve been served. And lets not forget that most important rule of all: reading is fundamental. So how about practicing some of those fundamental skills, or are you too busy basking in the glory of children singing love songs to you?

In other news and opinion:

How to Lose Friends and Annoy Your Enemies

Hear Our Cry, Obama?. Check out the 1st comment.

Video: Whoopi says Polanski didn’t commit “rape-rape”

Great advice on the left’s race-card playing

Is Franken ACORN’s Man In The Senate?

Rockefeller, Schumer push public-option amendment in Senate